First things first: this 738 page novel is very much in the can't-stop-reading-just-yet category. It's hugely entertaining and Wolfe's writing, as usual, is almost sublime.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Wolfe's aim seems to be the moral skewering of today's youth, and to achieve that target, he has had to resort to stereotypical, or worse, unbelievable characters. The title character Charlotte in particular is an enigma: how could someone so smart be so stupid and badly informed at the same time? I don't care if she's lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere all her life, it's still not believable just how naive she is.

The particular plot vehicle Wolfe chooses to employ is the most cliche of them all: female sexual experiences gone wrong. The aftermath in this particular incident is so unrealistic and anger-inducing that it kills all the momentum the book has built up. By the end, it's clear it wasn't college life that corrupted Charlotte; no, she was that way all the time, but previously lacked the means to express it.