THE BOOK OF HOT

The pseudonymous Mrs. Hot offers a guide to women nearing 60 who are currently in—or planning to join—the dating scene, featuring accounts of her personal experiences and tips on beauty and self-confidence.

Following her divorce, the debut author was a single mother who spent two decades in voluntary celibacy. But after her son left home, she felt it was time for a change. In her late 50s, she opted to transform into a person she called “Mrs. Hot” and start dating again. In this first book of a planned duology, she details her various life changes, from leaving her unnamed “highly stressful public service job from hell” to getting cosmetic surgery, including Botox treatment. She also took up dieting and exercise, mainly because she wanted a “smokin’ hot body” to attract men. She offers her readers numerous tips, including on how to choose the right perfume, adopt good posture, and radiate confidence in order to feel, think, act, and be sexy. Her specific advice on dating, meanwhile, focuses primarily on the online variety. Along the way, Mrs. Hot warns of potential scammers—including men who have no intention of having any interactions beyond the virtual—and provides a bevy of suggestions for stimulating sexting. Later, she shares some of her own escapades in the post-50 dating world. They include dates with men of various ages; some were selfless lovers, she says, while others were complete misfires, such as one man who seemed more interested in a movie than he was in Mrs. Hot. This work will likely be encouraging to women who share the author’s age and relationship status. Although Mrs. Hot does promote the benefits of physical beauty, she also maintains that true attractiveness comes from within; throughout the book, she encourages women to release their “Inner Goddess.” She also highlights the power of positive thinking and the importance of loving oneself. She does, however, seem to contradict herself when she says that those who are obese and happy “are simply rationalizing their way to eating whatever they want.” Mrs. Hot’s prose is concise, with many instances of clever wordplay, particularly in chapter subtitles, such as “Taking Delivery of the U.S. Male” or “I Experience Getting Lust in the Stacks.” Indeed, her accounts of sexual encounters are similarly more playful than they are erotic. For instance, she writes that a 27-year-old “nice Italian boy” named Daniele “gave me a full, passionate serving of his native tongue—and I don’t mean a lesson in Italian.” The erotic tales in this book eschew BDSM (“It’s Fifty Shades of Nay, in my opinion”) and occur in places that some readers may feel are sex-fantasy clichés (such as a plane, a movie theater, and a beach). Nevertheless, the author’s dating stories, while a mixed bag, are often delightful—and on more than one occasion, she intriguingly tells of deepening feelings (love, perhaps?) for a man she was seeing.

An entertaining and educational firsthand account of an older woman’s single sexual life.