Exactly how steamy is this story?
R
We're stamping the big ol' R on this baby for sex, violence, sexual violence, masturbation, and swearing. We're pretty sure that's everything you can be rated R for.
Oh, you wanted specifics?
Well, this is a book about sexual abuse, so there are some descriptions of... well, sexual abuse. We're not gonna lie: it can get graphic. We don't think it's gratuitous, though; the book just doesn't shy away from it, and readers aren't always used to such a frank treatment of something that we still don't usually see, or even talk about. In this novel, the sex and violence go hand-in-hand, so it is important that both are shown. Dorothy Allison doesn't whitewash anything here.
Also, keep in mind that Bone is telling us about her experiences as a child, so she doesn't always understand what exactly Glen is doing to her, and her descriptions reveal that.
Another reason this book gets its R-rating is that Bone starts masturbating as she gets older. The descriptions of it are, for the most part, more about what she's thinking than about what she's doing, but again, some readers might not be used to the fact that it gets mentioned at all.
All in all, though, this isn't HBO: Dorothy Allison isn't just throwing in these scenes for the heck of it, or because she likes making school boards angry. Bone's understanding of sex is largely determined by her abuse; her masturbatory fantasies involve escape from Glen, or defiance of him. Bone, like other pre-adolescents (like Reese, for instance), is going through a period of sexual realization, on top of having to deal with her unwilling "sex life" with Glen. Part of Bone's suffering stems from the shame she attaches to thinking about sex in a way that involves Glen at all.
We need to know the details, uncomfortable as they may be for us, in order to understand what Bone is going through—and to understand what sexual abuse actually does to a person. If Allison had shied away from these details, the abuse here might not seem so bad.