How Not to Fall

Foster uses her professional sex-educator expertise as a basis for her debut novel; unfortunately, the reader ends up feeling like a lagging student stuck in a lecture hall. Brilliant Annie Coffey, a senior in psychophysiology at Indiana University, has an enormous crush on postdoctoral fellow Charles Douglas, who runs her lab class. Instead of flirting with him, she asks him directly whether he’d like to have sex. Charles worries about losing his job, but they agree that when she finishes her last class and is no longer his student, they will enjoy a no-strings fling until she leaves for Harvard Medical School. Clinical terms add a humorous tone to the erotic scenes. Foster painstakingly describes one-base-at-a-time sex before moving on to bondage and fantasies and finally investigating the difference between lust and love. The minutiae of Charles’s rock climbing and Annie’s ballet classes further slow the plot. Agent: Lindsay Edgecombe, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency. (July)