As I noticed elsewhere in this thread, the author deserves much credit for her courage and willingness to put her critical thinking cap on in writing this novel. Her described ability to tackle such a subject with a sense of humor is obviously an important element to alleviating some of the average Non-MAP reader's discomfort while contemplating such a hot button subject.

The only major problem I see is the continued use of popular, loaded language used by the sex abuse industry to negatively taint all discussions of intergenerational sexual contact: the use of terms like "abuse" in all cases of such contact, rather than utilizing value-neutral terms for the contact when such liaisons were mutually consensual. The same goes for the use of the term "offender." I know these terms are part of legal speak as well as the biased language of the common narrative, but I think it does serve to bias the readers against any and all such activity between adults and underage youth, rather than affording a more nuanced view of instances where consent was present.

That said, her use of community utilized terms like MAA--the still popular predecessor of MAP--and her questioning of pretty much all aspects of the common narrative is extremely commendable. I haven't read the book yet, having just learned of it today, but what I've seen so far appears to be a major challenge to the common way of approaching this topic. One of the best things about it from what I can see thus far is how she strongly critiques the capricious inflicting of iatrogenic and sociogenic harm on girls who are discovered to be having or to have had such contact, and puts this blame where it belongs, squarely on the hands of the social workers & therapists, and societal reaction, respectively. This as opposed to the much more common practice of downplaying or overlooking this major facet of the trauma and shame issues and basically giving these elements a free pass by instead focusing all the blame on MAPs who cross the legal line.

It's quite possible the author is a genuine feminist who is worthy of that term and what it actually means, as it's mentioned that she believes women should be allowed to define the experience according to how they felt about it, not according to the doctrine of shame and insistence upon trauma that society and the mental health industry largely imposes upon them.

It's also significant, I think, that this book focuses strongly on the issue of man/girl liaisons, and how the abuse narrative affects specifically girls and women. This is because man/girl relationships and GL have been so marginalized in studies of intergenerational relationships in favor of man/boy relationships and BL ever since the topic first came of interest to academia at large. This lopsided rather than equal emphasis has resulted in a much poorer understanding of man/girl relations than man/boy relations, which is a problem since it's quite clear that girls and women are subjected to the abuse narrative, and used as proxies for its promotion, considerably more often than boys. This is obviously one of the reasons why girls are more likely to experience shame and retroactively imposed regret from such relationships than boys, and this has nothing to do with inherent differences between males and females but is once again a societally influenced matter.

Finally, this novel puts paid to the anti-choice camp's notion that there are precious few Non-MAPs in existence who are willing or capable of putting their indoctrinated emotional biases aside when studying all aspects of this topic. It's becoming more and more clear that Nons with a more objective view, who are concerned with the implications of the hysteria beyond simple protectionist notions, have been out there all along, but simply silent with their more open-minded views for the same reason that MAPs have been afraid to step out of the shadows since the hysteria started a few decades ago. The more nuanced literature of the truly liberal 1970s decade also make this quite clear.