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Book Review: Light a Candle (Club Velvet Ice #4), by V. J. Summers

I received a copy of Light a candle, by V. J. Summers from Netgalley.

Description from Goodreads:
Will broke Dusty’s heart their senior year. One unexpected moment of passion between them, and Will freaked out. Not only wasn’t he gay, but he wasn’t kinky either—or so he insisted to Dusty. Their long friendship ended, and Dusty was left with only bittersweet memories of their last movie night together.

Ten years later, out as gay and a Dom, Will auditions for membership at Club Deviant, only to find that he’s been assigned an all-too-familiar submissive. His scene with Dustin feels like fate, and he’s determined to get back what they once had—and more.

Dustin had buried the pain of rejection deep, but playing with Will conjures all his memories of that one electric moment they shared and the friendship it destroyed. He’s built walls around his heart high enough to keep out the Trojan Army, but together, he and Will may find the courage to move beyond their past and face their future together.

Review:
OK, to start with, until I sat down to write this review I didn’t realize this was a fourth book in a series. I would never have picked it up if I had. I generally avoid latter books in a series, even if they are stand alone. But it’s read now and, who knows, maybe I would have liked it better if I’d read the previous three books. Maybe not, because I don’t know that my complaints resulted from anything related to the series itself.

Now, I don’t want to infer that I didn’t like the book, just that I had complaints. First, the characters are paper thin. Seriously, with the exception of the flashbacks, over the several weeks of the book, we don’t get a single scene outside the club. So, the book is wholly focused on Will’s pursuit of Dusty and Dusty’s avoidance of giving in. Meh.

Second, I didn’t think what happened between the two as teenagers deserved all that much angst. It just wasn’t that big a deal. They certainly never had a relationship, so claiming Dusty’s heart was broken seems a little extreme. We’re told they’d been friends for years, but we’re given one scene in which Dusty awkwardly invites WIll over to his house, as if they’re just becoming friends. I didn’t buy it.

Third, I get that wax play was supposed to be a big part of this, thus the title. But almost every single sex scene was a wax play scene. For an elite BDSM club they seem to have a very limited repertoire. The thing is, even if I found it super sexy, I’d have been bored with it. But really I thought it was pretty bland, especially Will and Dusty’s big climax scene. Meh.

I hated the Dom-talk. Why do all Doms in these sorts of books have to talk in stiff, complete sentence, call every one ‘boy’ (which just squinks me out, like something that should be uttered only in Deliverance) and never use contractions. Meh.

So, in conclusion, while this was an ok book and some people might be thrilled with it, I remained only mildly interested throughout.

Book Review of For Real, by Alexis Hall

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I received a copy of For Real, by Alexis Hall from Netgalley.

Description from Goodreads:
Laurence Dalziel is worn down and washed up, and for him, the BDSM scene is all played out. Six years on from his last relationship, he’s pushing forty and tired of going through the motions of submission.

Then he meets Toby Finch. Nineteen years old. Fearless, fierce, and vulnerable. Everything Laurie can’t remember being.

Toby doesn’t know who he wants to be or what he wants to do. But he knows, with all the certainty of youth, that he wants Laurie. He wants him on his knees. He wants to make him hurt, he wants to make him beg, he wants to make him fall in love.

The problem is, while Laurie will surrender his body, he won’t surrender his heart. Because Toby is too young, too intense, too easy to hurt. And what they have—no matter how right it feels—can’t last. It can’t mean anything.

It can’t be real.

Review:
Another stellar read from Alexis Hall. I really shouldn’t be surprised. I’m getting pretty close to card-carrying fangirl status, if I’m honest. I thought this one was quite different from anything else I’d read by him; Shackles maybe coming closest. (Though, I haven’t read his whole catalogue.) But I was skeptical picking it up because of the BDSM theme. I simply haven’t had great luck with such books.

I get that BDSM is having its moment in the book world, right now. There seem to be an unusual number of ‘romances’ coming out using it as a schtick…or a theme, maybe. But I find that as much as I like the idea of it, I’m almost always disappointed, if not disgusted by them.

Because, here’s the thing, I don’t know what it’s like in a real-life BDSM pairing, but the overwhelming number of books I’ve read with BDSM read like what my dear mother, who despises anything that removes the sacred from the sexual, calls ‘mutual masterbation.’ In other words, the characters in the scenes feel not like two people engaging in a meaningful way and having sex with one another, but two people individually using the other as an object for masterbation, connected by nothing more than proximity and ocular availability. And I rarely find that anywhere near as sexy as it’s intended to be. (My own interpretation of Dalziel’s jadedness, coloured by my own experiences of course, was that he was sensing this same tendency to force a partner into a fantasy mold that you act upon, instead of engage with on a personal, human level.)

This is where For Real shined for me. I understood both Dalziel and Toby’s needs and how/why they filled those needs for one another. I saw how hard they each worked to make the other happy and I understood the BDSM aspect of their relationship as something other than a fantasy one individual perpetuates on another. I didn’t need a narrator to repeatedly reassure me that the scene wasn’t abuse because the sub really was enjoying it, because I could see that and I understood why. And. It. Was. Beautiful.

Both Dalziel and Toby were wonderful characters. I especially appreciated that they weren’t flawlessly gorgeous people, beautiful to eachother, sure, but Dalziel was blunt and often angry looking and Toby was too skinny and had acne. I really love finding relatable, normalish people in books. I also thought Toby’s teenaged voice was marvellous, though I was admittedly skeptical about a man/boy who got a D and an F on their GCSEs having the vocabulary, poetic familiarity and general depth of thought of an Oxford scholar. But I was able to roll with it.

There were some fun side characters—the bisexual best friends with an obviously open relationship, Angel with the purposefully vague gender, Dominic the Dom (who played the alto-sax and seemed to be an unbearably nice guy), the free-love mother, the academics. Man I’d love to see Jasper and Sherry get their own book.

And as always, Hall managed to rip my heart out with the unintentional cruelties of lost love. I was never sure if I wanted Robert to suffer horribly or not—not for ending a relationship necessarily, relationships die, but for not seeing the ongoing injury his actions cause. Does such a person deserve to go on and be happy if he’s so unaware of his own destructive wake? Or am I just truly so unforgiving?

My complaints are few on this one: the overly intellectual nineteen-year-old I mentioned above, the fact that anyone as open and honest as Toby would be hard to find in real life, the fact that I didn’t feel I got to know Dalziel outside of his submission very well, and a couple of the scenes took on such a dream-like quality as to stand out as somewhat unmatched to the rest of the book.

All in all, I loved it. I’m not one who usually rereads books. My recall is such that I remember too much to ever have that fresh new feeling with a story. But unusually, I could see myself reading this again just to re-experience it.

Review of Buffy Chistopher’s Bound By Darkness

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I grabbed Buffy Christopher-Vincent’s Bound By Darkness off of the KDP free list. At the time of posting it appeared to still be free, there and on Smashwords.

Description from Goodreads:
Lila Anderson’s is having visions of murdered women in the back alleys of San Francisco through the eyes of a hero trying to save them. She’s supposed to be a dominatrix, not a psychic! This hero has a name. Drake Bennett. Drake leads a solitary life as a vampire and when Lila invades his mind he wants her out.

Then a known murderer kidnaps Lila, and uses her life experience in bondage and domination to break her and turn her against Drake. Will the deep feelings of desire she has for Drake and their psychic link be enough to save Lila before she succumbs to her dark desires?

Review:
I picked this book up solely because I thought it was interesting that the main character was a Dominatrix. I envisioned a strong, sexually dominant female who knows her own mind and body. I thought, ‘well, this could be fun.’ It wasn’t.

Lila was billed as a Dominatrix but in almost every sex scene she was playing a Submissive, getting off on her own rape essentially. (That’s Submissive with a capital S by the way.) I don’t mean to infer that BDSM and Dom/Sub relationships are akin to rape, of course not. But in the first sex scene for example, Lila was shackled, gagged, blindfolded and whipped by a homicidal maniac that she was terrified of, knew had killed at least one woman THAT NIGHT, didn’t want to be in session with, but couldn’t escape, and had no reasonable expectation of survival. Then afterwards she cried because of the trauma. Rape. And she’s supposed to have orgasmed in the middle of all of that? Riiiggghhhttt.

I very rarely don’t finish books, but I almost gave up at that point. I just wouldn’t have picked that book up to start with. That’s before I even get into whether I believe Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs would have allowed her to enjoy any aspect of the experience if she was so scared for her life. Maybe I’m just being naive about the life-style, but it seems unlikely that basic biology would allow the body to prfioritize sexual satisfaction over physical survival to start with, no matter how much you like pain, need release, or how you’ve been ‘trained’. Both fear and climax require hormones and, while no expert, I would expect those that produce fear to top those that lead to sexual enjoyment. It’s worth noting too, that in those scenes in which she isn’t a Submissive, she is never once a Dominant either.

Having read the book I can now read between the lines of the description and see that the clues were there. I just didn’t see them, so I can’t completely fault Christopher-Vincent for my dislike of the subject matter. I chose to read the book. I apparently let myself focus on the character’s Dominatrix role as the primary focus of the description instead of the “life experience in bondage and domination to break her.” Yea, that’s the theme of the book. There is no female empowerment here. If you’re looking for it, go elsewhere. I kind of wish I had.

The basic writing in the book is fine. I didn’t notice very many editorial mishaps and, though I found it exceedingly repetitive, the plots moves along. Granted this is erotic fiction. There’s probably 70 pages of plot and 200 pages of sex, most of it questionably consensual (if not wholly non-consensual).

In the end I can’t completely trash the novel. I might not have liked it, and I didn’t. I had to force myself to finish it. I acknowledge that most of those things I disliked are of the personal opinion sort. I was uncomfortable with Lila’s constant role as a victim and her sexual satisfaction during extended scenes of abuse. These men were trying to hurt and break her. There were no safe words to use, no trust or understanding that the Sub was actually a power player in the game. She was a slave. There was never any real explanation for why Lila started having visions of Drake to start with and I thought that the centuries old antagonist was dispatched far, far too easily. These opinions can’t reasonably be seen as a reflection of the book’s intrinsic value as a piece of literature though, erotic or otherwise. I did really like the host of side characters, especially Charlie and David, and Drake was a pure, kind soul that you couldn’t help but route for.