This book was the most detailed, and yet explicit book I've ever read in my life! I enjoyed reading it, and couldn't put it down. Candy is this beautiful young teengage girl who attracts men everywhere, even her own relatives! In a way Candy was sort of "clueless", but overall, I still enjoyed the story.

Having read Candide first, reading Candy was purely accidental, a fluke, or perhaps a dare, but part way into the book I recognized its inspiration, and enjoyed it immensely from then on. It is truly hysterical, as was the original Voltaire. Candy, however, includes snippets of ideas from other Classics: read it for yourself to see if you can guess each chapter's parent story. I have enrolled in a course that requires the reading of Candide - I am recommending Candy to the instructor who has never read it!

Southern's tour-de-force follows the innocent, beautiful Candy Christian as she runs sexually afoul of a whole bunch of scheming, horny men. Since she is pure and giving, she wants to please them, but gee whiz! Are they ever strange!

"Candy" was banned in the United States in the Fifties and received its first publication in Paris. Southern and Mason Hoffenburg, an American poet, admitted that they had written the book primarily to make money, since churn-'em-up pornography was what Olympia Press chef Maurice Girodias was paying for. Of course, the book became so much more than a cutesy best-seller: it was the satire of the century, throwing wide-eyed, white-skinned Miss America into a den of the great bugaboos of the time (including a Jewish doctor, a hunchback, and Daddy!). Read it till its thunderous and pulsating conclusion.