Rachel Max gets more than she bargained for when she leaves her small Vermont town for California seeking adventure, love, and meaningful work, in that order. After a brief attempt to live in LA with her two best friends, she ends up in San Francisco, working as an editor/reporter for an online sex journal. Making her way through a maze of sex parties, sex workers, and sex-positive radicals, Rachel discovers aspects of her own eroticism, not all of them welcome, and it's a challenge for her to write about sex in the upbeat, lighthearted tone demanded by her publisher-boss. She struggles to handle the job, a new boyfriend, and the brave new world she's discovered, facing the reality that an adventurous life is far more complicated than she'd anticipated.