Jen Platt Walks into a Bar — “Ouch!”

A GIRL WALKS INTO A BAR Helena S Paige (Jonathan Ball, R95)

‘URGH! I can’t believe it,” I say to my housemate, tossing A Girl Walks into a Bar onto the coffee table. “I ended up going to a coffee shop for a cup of hot chocolate, then heading home to watch Bridget Jones’s Diary. All by myself! I didn’t have sex at all!”

“True to life then,” he laughs. “Let me see,” he says, picking up the choose-your-own-erotic-destiny novel. “Ooh, what panties did you wear?” he asks when he gets to the end of the first chapter. “If you choose the purple lacy g-string, turn to page 3. If you choose the comfy pants, turn to page 4. If you choose the controltop knickers, turn to page 5. If you choose to go commando, turn to page 7.”

“Well, I chose the comfy pants, but then I had to put on the g-string,” I tell him. “Who wears g-strings anyway? They’re so ’90s.”

After a long debate about the impracticalities and trendiness of the gstring versus the tanga and the thong, housemate speedreads his way into the novel’s dimly lit bar, flirting with the hot, young bartender, meeting a shady, hairy-chested character, a sexy rock star and his enormous (!) yet friendly bodyguard, and a sultry woman in the bathroom, and finally chooses to go with the sophisticated businessman, who he wanted from the moment he walked in. With glee, he tells me he had sex with the George Clooney-type media mogul.

“But that was some hectic S&M stuff,” I say.

My housemate and I have the same taste in fantasy men — preferring the Cloon to the Pitt. But I decided not to be whacked with a paddle as soon as the Cloon lookalike wheeled out a locked suitcase from under the bed and ordered me (ordered me!) to put on a black leather corset thingy. Uhm, no thanks. So I flipped back a couple of pages, retreating to the safety of a well-lit coffee shop.

You see, in A Girl Walks into a Bar, the reader — unlike the insipid Anastasia Steel of Fifty Shades of Grey — has a degree of agency. Your Inner Goddess can rule and often does.

The book is written in the same style as the choose-your-own-adventure gamebooks in which the second-person voice is used, making you the heroine of your own story. After each chapter, you face two to four options. It’s a clever ploy and works well in this innovative form of erotic fiction.

Helena S Paige (pseudonym of authors Helen Moffett, Sarah Lotz and Paige Nick) wants you to take charge — and boy, there are plenty of choices. But beware: there are surprising little twists at the end of each adventure, and they all go all the way.

While the giggle factor is present in the book, the sex scenes are well-written without being smutty. It’s a fun way to spend a night in — if you’re not brave enough to head out to an actual bar. —