cover image Let’s Get It On

Let’s Get It On

Jill Nelson, . . Amistad, $24.99 (268pp) ISBN 978-0-06-076330-5

Now playing: the second verse of Nelson’s wildly popular debut (Sexual Healing ), with Marvin Gaye again providing the thematic backup for the over-the-top sexual shenanigans and ribald politics embraced by the proprietors of A Sister’s Spa. This time out, Yale-educated lawyer LaShaWanda P. Marshall, and fellow spa founders Lydia Beaucoup and Acey Allen recreate their successful unorthodox Reno, Nev., spa on a boat moored off Martha’s Vineyard. As Wanda puts it: “We were offering women multiorgasmic sex without the complications or mating, dating, or a relationship, and they were hungry for it,” In Martha’s Vineyard, the crew appeals to the established black community to open its arms to the new business while battling a mobster trying to shake them down, a racist madman in their midst and a president who aims to outlaw anything but sex-for-procreation with a bill called “No Child, No Behind.” It’s a dopey mix of overbroad sexual and racial politics, but the sisters still manage to sizzle—and elicit smiles with their insatiable appetites for love, social justice and the sex trade. (June)