Thirteen-year-old Melanie Chaffee’s got a crush, a cash flow problem and an abnormal gift for drawing. So when the school jock offers to pay her to produce pictures of naked women for him and his flunkies, she puts aside any moral qualms she might have and sells out for the price of a pair of righteous platform sandals.

When her fledgling soft-core porn business turns into an all-out school phenomenon, Melanie sets up shop, aided by her best friends, bookish Anna, athletic Leslie and the incomparable Mavis Jackson, the only African American girl in the entire school. Everything she thought she wanted is hers for the taking, including Ethan Wilde, the boy she’s coveted since the fifth grade. But in 1976, news of the feminist movement has reached even her small Arizona town, and Mel must choose between her new life as a junior high publishing mogul and her burgeoning feminist principles and decide, for better or worse, who and what, she really is.