When Megan, a naive eighteen year old, begins a degree course in English and French at Birmingham University, she has no idea how much her life will begin to parallel the books she is studying. Lurching from one escapade to another, encountering a number of suitable and unsuitable young men, whilst simultaneously having to deal with revelations about her parents and still manage to attend lectures, Megan nevertheless emerges as a sympathetic yet often comic heroine in a novel that blends Bildungsroman with chivalric romance and the picaresque tradition. The story is firmly rooted in the 1980s, following the lives of Megan and her friends in a pre-internet world peppered with both literary and pop-culture allusions. Most importantly, it is a novel about growing up and the difficult decisions faced by all young girls as Megan herself realises that "Literature ..., whether ... French or English, [is] nothing but secrecy and love triangles" and, as life begins to imitate art, must ultimately choose between two very different men in her life.