"They say that some people are born great," Lauren Fontaine, the protagonist of Faulk"s debut novel, says by way of introduction, "some people achieve greatness, and some people have greatness thrust upon them. I am clearly in the third category, and at this point I"d like to thrust it right back." Lauren, a managing partner at an Atlanta investment firm, is hitting her late thirties and beginning to despair of ever finding another man to love. Although she is uncomfortable around other women, she considers herself an avowed feminist and is appalled when the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is absolved of any responsibility in the suicide of the wife he had been beating brutally. On the same day that she decides to travel to Washington to join hundreds of thousands of women in protest, she hears the story of Lysistrata, Aristophanes"s earthy satire, in which the women of Greece end a war between Athens and Sparta by withholding sex. And thus a plot is set in motion. But all good plots require complications, and therefore Lauren decides on a life of celibacy just as she meets Jake Ward, the handsome Pulitzer-winning writer she"s had a crush on for years. The story plays itself out at a leisurely pace, with frequent anecdotal digressions, but always with a certain simple charm and earnestness.