With My Body is the second book in the Bride Trilogy by Australian author, Nikki Gemmell. In modern-day England, an unnamed woman, a wife and mother of three young boys, is unhappy with her life. She is almost forty, exhausted from the demands of husband and sons, the PTA president and the school demands, and bored with the routine of life. She hasn’t had sex in two years. Her despair causes her to thinks back to her adolescence in Australia, and the man who taught her to make love. It was an affair that was passionate, liberating and transforming.

The story is told in the second person, which does take a little getting used to. It is split into ten sections, which are divided into 225 (mostly very short) chapters, headed as “Lessons” and each prefaced with a quote from a Victorian volume entitled “A Woman’s Thoughts About Women” (which actually does exist). The first section and the last two are set in the present day; the middle sections deal with the woman’s life from the impressionable age of eleven, through her sexual awakening and into her early adulthood.

Readers should be prepared for certain concepts that are touched on in this novel: teen sex, bondage, and group sex, as well as some fairly explicit descriptions of sex; this is erotica, after all. However, the narrative (which is perhaps just a little slow in the middle) also explores the woman’s relationship with her father, her step-mother, a predatory artist and the writer who eventually becomes her lover, the man whose lessons she is recording. The plot does not necessarily go quite where the reader might expect, and this book is certainly better that the first book in the trilogy.