REVIEW | The Cougar Book | Edited by Jolie du Pré | Logical-Lust

Lusty cougars are on the prowl, in this intriguing anthology from Logical-Lust. The archetype of the older woman on the hunt for young male flesh has come to prominence in recent years, thanks to fictional characters such as Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones in Sex and the City, and Courteney Cox’s Jules in Cougar Town, and real-life examples including Madonna and Demi Moore. As Valerie Gibson, author of Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men, says in her introduction to this book, ‘women who embrace “cougardom” openly without fear or reservation, are … not only acknowledging their continuing sensuality and sexuality, but embracing it wholeheartedly’. Society has tended to write off women in their forties and fifties as no longer having anything to offer as a potential bed partner, and the heroines in these 23 stories are determined to prove that’s far from the case.

In Jeremy Edwards’ Boston. Breasts. Bohemian. the owner of a small, arty publishing house takes her pick of the young men her company employs as editorial assistants, bringing a new meaning to ‘entry-level position’. In Heidi Champa’s Spring Training, a woman with a dull job on a university campus finds her days being brightened by the sight of Derek, the cutest member of the baseball team, who she watches training from her office window. In Donna George Storey’s Comfort Food, a recent divorcée develops a taste not only for the butterscotch pudding on the menu of the hotel where she’s taking a much-needed holiday, but also the hot chef whose recipe it is. And in Brenna Lyons’ Mine For The Night, a middle-aged scientist in a future where society has been decimated by plague has the enviable task of initiating genetically engineered young men in the art of sex before they are allowed out of the laboratory to join the female-heavy remnants of the world’s population.

If The Cougar Book has a fault, it’s that a few too many of the stories feature rich bitch divorcées with flawless bodies and insatiable appetites, characters whose adventures offer a deal of wish fulfilment, but who all tend to begin to merge into one after a while. More interesting are the stories where the cougar might not be so aware of her own potential as a seductress, like Adriana Kraft’s A Taste of Ginger, where the eponymous heroine hooks up with a young stud on her first visit to a swinging club, much to her delighted disbelief, or Craig J. Sorensen’s Adrian’s Lover, where the older woman is a blues guitarist whose biggest successes are long behind her, but who can still inspire awe and lust in the young journalist charged with the task of interviewing her.

If you’re looking for stories in which older women enjoy sex on their own terms, and teach the young men they seduce plenty about love and life along the way, you’ll find much to enjoy in this collection. Watch out – these cougars have claws!