200 Monas A novel

Saenz's darkly funny debut finds a college senior scrambling to pay her late mother's debt to a drug dealer. Arvy Keening is still living at at her free-spirited mother's Texas home months after the funeral when she discovers a baggie of illicit pills. Then a large woman and an armed man show up at her door and inform her that the pills are Mona, a rare drug that stimulates mind-blowing orgasms for women. The pair demands that Arvy cover the $10K they expected from her mother's sale of the drugs, or they'll kill her. In a panic, she turns to her classmates' attractive drug dealer Wolf, who agrees to help off-load the pills. She also tests one of the Monas during an exam, which triggers vivid sexual fantasies involving Wolf and others that lead to a wild orgasm. Though a handful of women are happy to find solo satisfaction from the pills, Arvy still has too many left in the bag as the 36-hour deadline looms. Arvy and Wolf's will-they-or-won't-they subplot drags on a bit too long, but Saenz's depiction of the erotic elements are delightfully over-the-top (Arvy's Mona dose ends with her emitting the "breathy cackle of a madwoman"), and the quest narrative builds to a satisfying reckoning with the complicated legacy of Arvy's mother. There's a beating heart at the center of this titillating story. Agent: Jessica Spitz, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Mar.)

With the help of a mysterious drug dealer, a bereaved biochemistry student tries to sell a stash of 200 pills--and also pass her finals--before she's scheduled to fly to San Francisco at the end of the week for a pharmaceutical internship. Four weeks before her final exams at Westheimer University in Central Texas, Harvey Moon Keening--called Arvy--lost her mother in a car crash that might have been an accident but that Arvy suspects was the result of what she and her mother called "the funk." Now Arvy has four tests to take, her aunt's incontinent foster dog to care for, and a Ziploc bag of 200 pills she thinks are molly to get rid of--the remnant of her "witchy" mother's "light drug dealing" mostly to women "who had lost a grip on their truer selves." As it turns out, however, the 200 pills are not molly, but Mona, an "experimental pharmaceutical made for women, by women, meant to treat extreme cases of sexual dysfunction and clitoral atrophy." Mona, in other words, gives its users overwhelming orgasms, plus a host of side effects including vomiting, blackouts, and waves of existential dread. Arvy has less than 36 hours to sell the pills or somehow come up with $10,000 for Francis Pete, her mother's charming-but-also-terrifying former "business associate." Sharp-witted and vulnerable--she brings her mother's ashes with her everywhere--Arvy is a delightful narrator of this high-stakes adventure. Including her increasingly serious flirtation with Wolf, the college's drug dealer, and the discovery of a cultish sorority for young women willing to pledge celibacy so they can "convert sexual energy into productive energy" and "use it for a greater purpose," the adventure is much like Mona itself: a propulsive romp haunted by an ever-present darkness. A wild, fun, and moving page-turner. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.