Alice is a 19-year-old classic film junkie who’s been sent down the rabbit hole to adulthood via McGill University in Montreal. She’s studying Arts, to her parents’ dismay. She’s shy and has difficulty knowing whom to trust, and in her very quiet way loves rock and roll. But the most significant detail about Alice, mentioned on the first page of Golda Fried’s debut novel, is that she’s a virgin who’s hesitant, even afraid, of making it for the first time. When she falls in love with a 23-year-old, eyeliner-wearing, slacker guitar player named Nellcott, readers will raise an eyebrow as the tension builds. Will these two have sex? Sounds like a tasty plot, but it’s not.

The problem isn’t the lack of sexy material – though there is such a shortage – but the lack of sexual conflict. Nellcott, who’s characterized as a rebellious but sensitive bad boy, is shockingly tolerant of Alice’s persistent abstinence. He explains his patience to Alice when he tells her, “You make me feel like a monk. You make me feel religious.” It’s fine, even intriguing, to read a story about a young punk choosing love over lust, but he struggles with his faith only a couple of times in the whole book, and the victories come way too easily.

Meanwhile, Alice’s exceedingly naïve conflict would feel more appropriate in young adult fiction: “with sex she was still clueless, though somebody sometime somewhere told her it was just another way of dancing with somebody.” It might make sense for an abnormally sheltered teenager – Amish, for instance – to express herself this way, but it doesn’t quite jive coming from a middle-class university student from the suburbs of Toronto.

It’s too bad, because Fried has a knack for creating interesting characters. “He told her he had always planned to get by fixing televisions. He wanted to live in a submarine” – this great line is used to describe Nellcott. Later, Nellcott comes out with this gem: “The key to feeling popular is to buy yourself a really small address book.”

Ultimately, these two compelling characters are only as interesting as the differences between them. There’s fertile ground in the space between Alice’s reluctance and Nellcott’s frustration, but sadly, it’s left relatively untouched.