Holding Out: A Novel
by By Faulk, Anne O. and Evans, Joni
Category: Fiction , General

What would happen if a bold, successful female executive called upon the nation's women to withhold sex until a highly placed spousal abuser was brought to justice? It would rock the country - and her life - that's what!Updating the story of Lysistrata - who persuaded the women of Athens to withhold sex from their husbands to end a war - Anne O.Faulk has written a Rabelaisian cautionary tale.Lauren Fontaine is a thirty-six-year-old financial wizard and single mother with a wicked wit and a tenacious sense of right and wrong. Like many other women, she is outraged when the wife of the chief justice of the Supreme Court commits suicide after years of spousal abuse - and the "good old boys" in Congress refuse to impeach the offender.When Lauren suggests that every woman in America refuse to have sex until the judge is removed from the court, her proposed sex strike sweeps the nation, and she soon finds herself pitted against almost every man in the country - and unwittingly placed at the center of the most controversial event in the history of the women's movement.Through it all, Lauren must come to terms with her own burgeoning (and perforce sexless) relationship with a handsome, world-famous writer, as well as her changing assumptions about women. She must deal with a financial scandal in her own office, the problems of her son as his mother becomes a national heroine, and the consequences, ranging from funny to tragic, for the women around her of her sex strike - all without losing her sense of humor.