Take the Class. Own Your Pleasure.
2024 Indie Book Award Finalist
Isabella’s sex column is wildly popular. Her sexless marriage? Not so much. With a looming deadline and zero desire, she enrolls in a university sex course, hoping to fix her libido — or at least her column.
Instead, she's thrown into a group from hell. Claire is tired of faking it and wonders if sex can ever be more than just meh. Amy loves sex but is a dating disaster. And Jeanette? No one can figure out why she's there. Including Jeanette.
Between packed schedules, raw conversations, and exercises that hit too close to home, the sex course pushes every one of Isabella's buttons. It's awkward. It's confronting. And it might not be working at all.
Until the women decide to stop playing it safe. Baring their truths — and their vulvas — they go all in.
But will the course help them reclaim their sex lives … or will they fail spectacularly?
Perfect for fans of Nine Perfect Strangers, Working Moms, and Grown Ups — but braver, bolder, and unapologetically sexier.
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Not in a clinical, textbook, lights-off kind of way. In a sit-up-straight, scribble-furiously-in-your-notebook, quietly-have-a-revelation-on-a-Tuesday kind of way.
That's exactly what happens when Isabella, Claire, Jeanette, and Amy sign up for Dr. Gwen Saunders' university sex course — and discover that learning about pleasure is really just learning about yourself.
They showed up expecting information.
They left with so much more than that.
Don't just take my word for it — hear from readers who've already devoured every page. From late-night page-turners to book club debates that got surprisingly personal, these reviews show why The Sex Course is the novel women are secretly passing to their friends and book club.
"Trina Read skillfully draws the reader into the lives of four women as they navigate their reality in The Sex Course...through the course they bond and create a new empowered version of self."
"Entertaining, engaging and empowering read. The book was not what I expected....it was even better. It follows the experiences of four different women who came together to support and uplift each other in finding their voice."
"I absolutely love this book and was caught up in the lives of the characters and the journey they were each on. I just wanted to join the course with these ladies!!!"
"Wow! I felt like I was taking the course with the women. I was very invested in the four characters and how they changed as the story went along. The book was empowering to women."
"This book is a gem! Unlike numerous self-help books, this fictional story guides female readers to understanding and receiving their very own sexual pleasure rather than how to be 'good in bed' for their partner's sake—ultimately creating intimacy, trust and a better relationship between two lovers."
Take the class. Own your pleasure.
The Sex Course is sex ed mixed with hilarious fiction and helps women understand her sexuality in a cheeky, irreverent, non-self-help'y way.
You'll laugh out loud, you'll recognize yourself in the characters, and somewhere in between the fiction and the facts, things will just click. No jargon, no shame spiral, no homework. Just the stuff you probably wish someone had told you years ago, delivered straight to your inbox, completely free.
Thousands of women have already grabbed their sample. Yours is one click away.
Dr. Gwen Saunders' sex course isn't what any of these women expected. It's not about techniques or tricks or a list of positions to try on a Tuesday.
It's about mindset. It's about communication. It's about understanding why the sex life you have right now is a direct reflection of everything you believe — consciously or not — about what you deserve.
Each week, the women get an assignment. Each week, they're asked to take what they've learned and try it in real life. And each week, the results are funny, messy, vulnerable, and more transformative than anyone planned.
This is the story of what happens when four women decide to stop going through the motions — and start going after the real thing.
Curious what the women from The Sex Course wrote in their assignments?
The Sex Homework lets you read their real, unfiltered responses as they work through the course that changed their lives.
From awkward realizations to bold confessions, these journal-style entries reveal what each woman is really thinking about desire, relationships, and pleasure.
It’s part story, part behind-the-scenes experience, and impossible to read just one page.
Find out what Isabella, Amy, Claire, and Jeanette had to say with their sex homework.
* Their sex histories.
* Their sexual shames.
* What did they want out of sex?
It's all here, so what are you waiting for?
The Sex Course follows four very different women as they navigate six weeks of the most eye-opening class of their lives. Each one walks in with her own complicated history, her own walls, and her own quietly held hope that things could be better. Each one walks out changed.
Isabella is a sex columnist — she literally writes about pleasure for a living. And yet, she's juggling a demanding editor, two small kids, a home office crammed into a dining room corner, a husband who travels for work at the worst possible moments, and a sex life that has quietly, slowly, become something she dreads instead of craves.
She signs up for the sex course to write about it for her column. What she doesn't expect is that Dr. Gwen Saunders' very first class will crack something open in her that she can't close again. Because the thing Isabella discovers isn't a technique or a tip. It's that the sex life you currently have is the sex life you've been asking for.
And she is finally, finally ready to ask for something different.
Claire is the high-achieving lawyer who is excellent at absolutely everything — except asking for what she wants in bed. She has been faking orgasms for so long it has become a reflex she barely notices. She signs up for the sex course with a very specific goal: stop performing. Start feeling.
What she doesn't expect is how hard it is to break the habit of being easy to please. Claire's journey is about learning that the same intelligence and precision she brings to the courtroom works in the bedroom too — and that asking for what she wants isn't demanding. It's brave.
Amy is the one who found the course, told all her friends about it, and showed up on day one already excited. She is sex-positive, open, enthusiastic, and the unofficial emotional anchor of the group. She seems to have it all figured out.
She doesn't. Amy is also quietly, privately working on her own stuff — what it means to actually receive instead of always give, to stop managing everyone else's journey and start being honest about her own. Her story is funny, warm, and more vulnerable than she'd ever let on.
Jeanette has only ever been with one man. She is elegant, composed, deeply private — and when she is asked in the very first class to share why she is there, she announces she has absolutely no intention of discussing her private life with strangers and nearly walks out.
She doesn't. And that single decision — to stay in her seat, arms crossed, jaw tight, deeply uncomfortable — is the beginning of the most quietly transformative journey in the book. Jeanette's arc is the one that sneaks up on you. The one you'll be thinking about long after the last page.
The Sex Course doesn't just read well — it sounds incredible.
Seven voice actors bring Isabella, Claire, Jeanette, Amy, and the rest of the cast to life in a fully immersive listening experience. Every laugh, every awkward silence, every breakthrough moment hits differently when you hear it.
Whether you're commuting, working out, or unwinding with a glass of wine, this is the book you'll want in your ears.
Listen to The Sex Course audiobook today.
This isn't about finding Prince Charming or having better orgasms.
It's about four women who stop performing — in bed and in life — and start actually feeling.
Dr. Gwen doesn't teach techniques or positions. She goes straight for the dismantling decades of shame with homework assignments that will make you examine your own truth:
Why do you fake it? (And not just orgasms)
What if you start asking for what YOU want?
How can you lean into the pleasure you asked for?
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Here's what happens when a book club picks The Sex Course: someone reads a passage out loud, there's a pause, and then someone says "wait, that's literally me." And then everyone starts talking at once.
The rotating chapters make it easy — pick your character, own her journey, and watch how differently four people can read the exact same book. Isabella's chapter hits one woman hardest. Claire's hits another. Jeanette's sneaks up on everyone.
Dr. Trina is available to join your book club — virtually or in person — for a live Q&A. Bring your questions, your highlights, your confessions. She's heard it all and she's here for every bit of it.
Your New Favorite Sex-Positive Girlfriend
Dr. Trina Read spent over two decades as a sexologist watching the same thing happen over and over: women who knew something was missing in their sex lives but had no idea how to talk about it, ask for it, or even name it.
So she wrote them a story.
The Sex Course is Dr. Trina's debut novel — and it draws on everything she has learned from years of working with real couples and real women navigating real intimacy. The characters are fictional. The insights are not. Every breakthrough Isabella, Claire, Jeanette, and Amy have in that classroom is rooted in the same truths Dr. Trina has been sharing from the stage for years.
The result is a book that reads like a page-turner and lands like a revelation. It became a #1 bestseller and award-winner because it does something no other book quite manages: it makes you feel deeply seen — and quietly, warmly, changes the way you see yourself.
Because once you read it, you'll need to talk about it.
The Sex Course is available on Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, and Smashwords. Grab your copy wherever you love to shop for books!
None at all. The Sex Course is written for every woman, at every stage, with every level of comfort around this topic. Whether you're brand new to thinking about your sexuality or you've been on this journey for years, you'll find yourself in these pages.
No — but it is sexy. The Sex Course is women's fiction with a deeply sex-positive heart. Think: frank conversations about desire, real breakthroughs about communication, and characters figuring out their pleasure without shame. The heat is real, but the real heat is in the honesty.
This book was practically made for book clubs. The rotating POV chapters make it easy to pick a character and talk about her arc. Dr. Trina is available to join your club virtually or in person for a live Q&A.
Fill out this form to book Dr. Trina for your book club: https://forms.gle/uA4g73t6Hfb1GPsm7
Completely. The Sex Course doesn't shame. It doesn't judge. It doesn't tell you what to want or how to want it. It meets every woman exactly where she is — and then gently, warmly, hilariously shows her what's possible.
Dr. Gwen Saunders' first assignment is simple: write your sex history.
Not for anyone else. Just for you. To see, maybe for the first time, the full shape of your sexual story — where it started, how it shifted, what you stopped asking for and when.
Isabella dreaded it. Claire approached it like a legal brief. Jeanette almost didn't do it. Amy did it and surprised herself anyway.
And every single one of them came back to the next class changed.
That's what The Sex Course does. It doesn't tell you what to want. It hands you the pen and asks you to figure that out for yourself — with four of the most real, funny, and human women you've ever read keeping you company the whole way.
Class is starting. Your seat is waiting.
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