Category: Erotica

Review: The Red

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tl;dr: completely insane but satisfying erotica fantasy

The Story:

If you are unfamiliar with Tiffany Reisz, you may want to mentally prepare yourself. This book is bananas, but in the best possible way. The Red is about a young woman named Mona, who comes from scandalous beginnings (her mother was a free love kinda gal, and invited a man to impregnate her without any strings because she wanted a child) and is now faced with a arduous task of saving her late mother’s gallery from financial ruin. She’s gone over the books, and the prognosis in grim. Right at the moment she decides she can’t fight it any longer and needs to sell it, a mysterious man shows up, and offers her the money it will take to bring the gallery back from its debts IF she agrees to submit to his sexual appetites with a carte blanche agreement.

Mona is intrigued by the man, and really doesn’t want to sell the gallery, so she agrees. They embark on a year-long steamy affair, where she is given hints about their encounters from a variety of paintings. He shows up every few months for many hours of debauchery, which begin to become strange and twisted, and nearly unbelievable. She wonders if her imagination is that good, or if he’s drugging her somehow.

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Review: Heat

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tl;dr: save yourself some pain and stay far away from this garbage fire

The Story:

I picked up this book because I got a publisher email. If you’ll recall, I also reviewed the author’s last release, A Fare To Remember. I didn’t think it could honestly get worse than that one. I figured it would be a quick read, a few laughs, and then I’d write a review that was essentially a rehashing of the last.

This book was so much worse than the one before it. I don’t even want to review it. First, the review copy that they sent me was barely readable. The formatting was awful and random words and numbers were inserted throughout the book. I had the worst time following it because of those things. And not only that, but the story itself was the most bored I’ve ever been while reading erotica. The prose was infantile and awful. The characters were worse than paper dolls.

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Review: Off The Clock

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tl;dr: two sex therapists that have a lot to learn about love

The Story:

I don’t normally read back-of-the-book blurbs, but in this case, I did. It seemed interesting enough, and so I checked it out from the library, mostly because the blurb to the follow-up book, By The Hour, looked even more intriguing. Unfortunately, the library didn’t have that book, so, wary to purchase a book without knowing if I would like the author’s style, I borrowed this one first. And I’m so glad that I did, for a variety of reasons, least of which is that the most interesting part of the story was a complete surprise.

The first few chapters are a bit of an extended prologue where we get to know Marin and Donovan. Donovan is a doctoral student working on his thesis about aural methods of female arousal, by recording himself dictating fantasies that are supposed to be coming from the female gaze, or at least, more arousing for women than pornography, which tends to work better for men. After a week of working together on the scripts for the audio recordings, Marin and Donovan have passion sex on one of the desks in the lab. Marin doesn’t give him her real name, and she doesn’t even plan to see him again, ever. Due to a family crisis, she ends up dropping out of school and thinks that she’ll never see him again…

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Review: The Queen

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tl;dr: a totally satisfying conclusion but i selfishly want more

The Story:

The final full-length novel in the Original Sinners series is just as haunting as all the ones that precede it. After engaging in an public display of affection, Nora wants to confess to Søren about two times that she nearly came back to him during the time they were separated, since she has realized from his behavior as of late that he is likely not going to be a priest much longer.

The Queen takes us through her training by Kingsley to be the city’s most notorious Dominatrix, and navigating her joy at freedom and her pain at being without Søren, whom she still loves deeply. Eleanor is reborn as Nora, and has to prove herself when their entire kink community knows her as being the submissive of the priest. There’s even a villain, another dominatrix that uses her knowledge of the kink community as a weapon, trying to keep everyone afraid of her.

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Review: Family Jewels

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tl;dr: could not get invested into this sorta-forbidden, sorta-office romance

The Story:

Context is key in romance. I learned this from Emily Nagoski, whose book Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life was eye-opening in not only a personal relationships sort of way, but also in the way that helps me explain why a romance novel works or doesn’t work for me. As far as romance novels go, the reader needs to have a sense of who the characters are, because most of the plot is driven by the emotional response to what is happening between the two characters. In Family Jewels, I couldn’t get enough of a sense of either character, and how they related to each other, in order to care about their romance.

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Review: The Prince

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tl;dr: soul-shattering bliss that’ll have you begging “merci”

The story:

The Prince picks up where The Angel left off, picking you back up before throwing you to the ground again. Repeatedly. I find it so difficult to review books that have given me so many Feels(tm) and wrecked me, but in a way that has me begging for more. (Tiffany Reisz is as sadistic as her priest.) So, I’ll try my best.

The narrative is split between two stories; Kingsley and Soren as an erotic sleuthing team going into the past of their childhood at St Ignatius, the Jesuit private school where they met, and Nora and Wesley in Kentucky, the land of horse-racing and money. What links the stories together is the underlying threat that was introduced in The Angel: the mysterious thief who stole Nora’s file from Kingsley’s office.

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Review: A Fare To Remember

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tl; dr: no plot, just badly written porn

The story:

I’m no stranger to a racy novel. In fact, some of my favorites have some pretty explicit content. However, I do tend to require some kind of plot with my novels, and this book … did not have one. It had just as much plot as I imagine a pornographic film would, meaning it was pretty thinly developed and barely made sense, stringing together the erotic scenes rather than composing a story.

The description for this book is 100% inaccurate, especially since ‘Rex’ is not a character in this book. The handsome billionaire is Reid, and what the description also doesn’t say is that Stevie becomes entangled in a menage-a-trois with Reid’s roommate and business partner, Dylan (who is also a billionaire, but he’s different, he’s ‘bad’ because he has tattoos).

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Review: Coming Home

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Ugh.

So the cover is beautiful.

But this was not a novel. Or even a novella.

This was a very rough draft of an interesting story, that started near the very end of it. I wasn’t invested in any of the characters, because all the backstory was filled in by a bunch of info dumps scattered throughout. The characterization, particularly for the heroine, was scattered and hard to follow, and honestly, not very well thought out. I mean, is she tough or not? Can she take care of herself or not? Is she sassy or sweet? And her BROTHERS. OH. MY. GOODNESS. They may have well have bartered for her worth with the hero, because that whole scene was cringeworthy at best.

The emotions didn’t resonate because they weren’t earned. The smut took turns being sorta hot and then being completely weird. (Second book in a row where the lines “and she loved it!” feature during a sex scene. Just… why? If she’s encouraging it to continue, the reader can figure it out.)

A lot of this book made me cringe. “If Kansas were his woman she wouldn’t be walking the streets by herself late at night.” HIS WOMAN?

and

“Kansas was naturally beautiful and didn’t need the layers of makeup some women felt the need to trowel on.” But some women DO need it?

and “He went to her bookshelves and perused what was there. You could tell a lot about a person from their personal belongings.” Or he could ask her?

And then Tobias goes back and forth several times on how his past experiences in the DEA affected him. He says that he hated the man it made him, that it didn’t even help anyone, but in the end he’s proud of the work he did?

Ugh. I just can’t go on.

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