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.