Tag Archives: erotica

Book Review of Bound By Blood (Soul Mates #1), by Jourdan Lane

It’s day three of my personal Bound By Blood challenge, where I set out to read five books titled Bound By Blood. Today’s fare was Jourdan Lane‘s Bound By Blood.

Description from Goodreads:
Houston nightclub Rave is famous for nearly-naked male dancers and beautiful bartenders. Like Peter, a young man with a strict rule about one-night stands with locals. He breaks that rule for Lucien, the owner of The Den, a rival nightclub where there are no boundaries, no taboos. Only he doesn’t realize just who Lucien is when he does. When Peter finds out that the man he wants to get to know even more is a vampire, he figures he should have stuck to that rule. He’s not fan of vampires or most other creatures of the night, but Lucien is relentless in his seduction. Peter resists Lucien as long as he can, but when he gives in, he does it in a big way, falling headfirst in to the dark, violent world of vampires, werewolves, and other creatures he’s only read about.

Peter and Lucien begin a very dangerous dance of sensual heat and deep emotion, one that causes them nothing but trouble. No one approves of the human and vampire match, including those in Lucien’s Coven, old enemies, and even older friends. Peter and Lucien have to struggle to stay together and protect those they love. Can they beat the forces that will try to tear them apart forever? And can they face what will become of Peter if they stay together?

Review:
The first thing anyone needs to know about this book is that it’s porn with plot. It’s a weak plot to be fair, but there is a little plotting. There is also lots and lots and lots and lots of sex. There is so much sex that about half way through this book, even suspending as much disbelief as one has to to read vampire/werewolf themed erotica, I started to cringe on behalf of the characters. Seriously, there couldn’t have had any skin left between them. I had sympathy friction burns and could only see them as rubbed absolutely raw. Raw, I tell you!

It’s fun sex though. It’s all consensual. It’s all of the ‘let me show you how much I love you’ sort, even when it’s not monogamous. And it’s not. The end of this book is essentially a series of orgies, with no indication that these men mean this situation to change. But it is sweet in its own way.

I did find the first third or so of the book clunky. Characters had complete 180° attitude shifts with no indication of an impetus of change. At one point, a man went from terrified of all things vampire to unafraid and half in love/lust with one in the course of a paragraph and I still have no idea why (other than he had to for the plot to progress). Meanwhile, his best friend went from encouraging him to get over his vampire-phobia to adamantly insisting he have nothing to do with the vampire, with no apparent reason to change his mind

The events of the story also moved from one to another, covering months at a time and glossing over the actual falling in love aspect of the romance with no transitions. It was jarring and I started to fear the book was heading toward a DNF. But once the characters accepted each-other things smoothed out. However, as they accepted each-other and Peter moved farther and farther into Lucien’s world their personalities changed drastically. They felt inconsistent.

Despite all that, the writing is really good and if you’re looking for some basic fap matter (or whatever the female equivalent is, schlick I think) this will do the trick.

Book Review of The Fallen (Sons of Wrath 0.5), by Keri Lake

I downloaded a copy of Keri Lake‘s The Fallen from the Amazon free list. I believe it is permafree.

Description from Goodreads:
To catch the Fallen, you have to become the very evil you were bred to slay.

Show loyalty. Be willing to go deep into the gritty underbelly of the world, where the vilest acts of human carnage thrive and seep into your mind like a black poison, consuming every part of you that was once good. Ignore your dark cravings and keep to the most important rule of all: never save the mortals.

This is the life of a Sentinel.

Some call us the toughest angels in the heavens. Unbreakable. But even the strong can break in the face of temptation.

Human females have always been the forbidden fruit for our kind—an enticement I’ve resisted for centuries, until she came along.

Karinna lusts for vengeance.

She wants inside the darkness, where the Fallen own the corrupted streets of Detroit—the perfect bait to take down the biggest crime ring the city has ever known.

I want her. To have her, though, I’ll have to break the rules.

For one taste of the forbidden, I’ll have to commit the most heinous sin of all …

Review: **spoilerish**
I must have missed the memo. When exactly did the word erotica become synonymous with abuse? This is complete drivel—cheap thrills and post Fifty Shade of Grey crap with a paranormal twist. Seriously, it is one big rape fantasy and glorification of abuse.

The thing is, I can understand the rape fantasy part. I REALLY don’t enjoy reading them (in fact, I had to force myself to finish this one), but I understand women who do. I totally get facing that fear on safe pages and forcing it into something you can garner a little excitement and fun from instead of just a terror inducing real possibility. I get that.

What I don’t get it why women, WOMEN (of which Ms. Lake is just one of many) would continue to write all females as mindless, volition-less, disposable commodities who rather enjoy their own abuse, up to and including death and dismemberment (and starting in childhood). This book is littered with quotes like this:

This woman has suffered since the day she was brought into this world.” Hasziel cupped her cheek and smoothed his thumb over her skin. “It is the only place in which she finds comfort.”

What nonsense. This book even suggests that the female=tradable possession to be passed by a man to a man as reward belief exists even in Heaven. Wow, I bet that’s what every good Christian woman dreams of when she prays for those pearly white gates.

Why is this seen as sexy? Why is this so common that I’m tempted to call it cliché. Women in this book are collected, disparaged, drugged, raped (almost constantly as background noise), beaten, “trained” (which is a euphemism for being abused until they stop fighting back and become docile enough to be raped by others…but it’s then presented as enjoying her position as sex slave), killed and dismembered. Meanwhile the MC is physically abused in some bastardized version of BDSM in which she has no control or realistic expectation of not being killed. In fact, she’s terrified.

Of course, she comes to love and crave it as an illustration of how all women really only want to be dominated, hurt and broken (and what good are they then?) by the men they love. (Thus, all those other women who have been abused and killed in the book probably enjoyed their rapes and murders too.) While simultaneously regaining memories of being gang raped by her father and his cronies, as if to suggest that any woman who desires something different than monogamous, vanilla sex must already have been defiled in some fashion. You’d think these were mutually exclusive, but apparently not.

It’s horrid. I went into this knowing it was a dark read. I’m no prude and enjoy the darker side of fiction (that’s why I picked this book up in the first place), but that doesn’t mean I wanted to spend 200+ being told how worthless me and my pussy are. I mean the whole concept of this book is that Xander can torture and kill people regularly, he can get blow jobs from a mindless sex slave, he can break women into said slave, he can kidnap, whip, and abuse Karinna, all with no heavenly repercussions. But god forbid his penis enter her vagina, even in love, and he’s condemned to Hell for all eternity. We women apparently aren’t just worthless, our vileness is contagious.

And let’s not miss that it is essentially JUST women we’re talking about. Almost as an afterthought Kid’s are thrown in too (but one would presume they’re at least half girls to start with and who know when boys age out of the victimizable children’s group), but never, NEVER men. The book is very clear on this.

Nothing more stony and unapologetic than a bitter angel forced to leave the heavens—even demons avoided the Fallen. Humans, on the other hand, couldn’t avoid them if they tried. Every day, kids and females got snatched up from the streets like smelt in a shallow pond, drugged and used at the amusement of their sadistic captors.

I could write an essay on the distancing technique being used in the use of ‘female’ instead of women, girls or a name (it crops up a lot). But I’ll let that one go. What I really want to point out is that I’m always amazed that truly evil beings are still expected to adhere to strict heterosexual norms. Men are never victimised, be it in a any sort of homoerotic way or just, you know, basic power dynamics. Baffling.

To wrap this up, I’d like it noted that at no point have I used the world misogynistic. Misogyny being the hatred of women and girls, but the word is often thrown around willy-nilly whenever a book or character treats women badly. I never got the impression that the author or even any of the cruelly dismissive men in the book hated women. To hate someone (as an individual or gender grouping) requires caring enough to have an opinion about them. It elevates them at least to the level of ‘human enough to think about.’

No one here did that. In a sense, I think this is worse. Women weren’t hated. They were just not accorded any sense of human agency, or even faces as they’re all masked as well as apparently thoughtless automatons. They were, as a whole, mere shadows that men act upon. I’m holding out hope that sometime in the near future the female population will realise that we’re worth more than this.

The book did try to redeem itself at the end by punishing the bad guys, but it was too little too late for me and really the exact same story could have been relayed without dehumanising every woman…excuse me, female…to pass the pages. (And been a damn good book too.) I’m giving this two stars and the only reason it’s not a single star is that mechanically it’s fairly well written. I like a spot of erotica here and again. I even like a bit of dark erotica. But I don’t want to finish the book feeling like shit about being a poor, pitiful, potentialess, penisless, disposable victim…i.e. a woman.

Book Review: Lion Hearted & Beast In Me (Divination Fall Trilogy #1&2), by Sommer Marsden

I initially downloaded Sommer Marsden’s Beast In Me from the Amazon free list. When I could never catch the prequel, Lion Hearted, free I gave up and bought it.

Description of Lion Hearted:
Tryg Avondale is the muscle for his pride, and when he’s called upon to hunt down two missing teens, he sees the job for what it is – a chance to give his pride a break from him and his “nature”. Tryg is a gay lion and it’s not something his “family” seems to embrace.

He takes with him Luke Dorchester – an empath and the perfect travel companion. Luke can feel and soothe every emotion that coils deep inside Tryg, and the sex between them is the hottest Tryg has ever known. Tryg has no intention of letting his emotions go any further when it comes to this brand new man. But he also has zero intention of letting him go. What follows is a road trip from campground to campground, hot nights in hotel rooms and close encounters spent together as they follow the scent of the two abducted shifters. A scent that takes them to Divination Falls, a haven for shifters and associated magical folk; a place where an old evil will surface and Tryg will learn just how far his love for lion-hearted Luke must take him.

Review:
I’m a bit torn on this one. In some ways I thought this was a fairly middling read, enjoyable but nothing to sing about. In other ways, I found myself surprisingly happy with it. I thought the plot was ok. I thought the characters were ok. I thought the sex was ok. I wasn’t displeased with any of it, but I didn’t find myself falling in love with any of it either.

However, somewhere in there, among the shallow character portrayals and weak plot, drug out over 100+ pages by copious amounts of sex (there is A LOT, so much that I thought the guys could probably have rescued the girls a lot sooner if they’d stopped shagging and got on with investigating) I found a series of touchingly romantic moments. Yes, almost all of them occurred in the middle of a sex scene and there is a bit of a sex=love correlation going on that I find a little disturbing. But regardless of their literary surroundings, I found Tryg’s slow change of disposition sweet, for lack of a better word.

Since there was sooo much sex, I should probably talk about it. None of it was overly graphic. It didn’t foray into kinky territory or anything. It was all fairly straight forward. My only real comment would be on the ridged roles. This never used to bother me. I came to reading M/M by way of yaoi manga, where I would call it the norm rather than the exception. But the more m/m I read the more often I find myself bothered when there is no flexibility in who gives and receives, asks or demands, etc. And I found it particularly notable here. It was emphasised and I found myself uncomfortable with it.

Speaking of uncomfortable, I didn’t care for Tryg calling Luke ‘boy’ all the time. Luke’s 25 to Tryg’s 32, so there’s no pedophilia or anything, but the use of ‘boy’ or, even worse, ‘the boy’ in sex scenes just felt hinky. Plus, it just seemed to be one more way to emphasise the power disparity between the two of them.

Lastly, I want to address the cover. I know this may seem irrelevant, especially since covers can so easily change, but this one hit a pet peeve of mine so I’m going to indulge myself by griping about it. If a book is going to have one of its characters on the cover (a dangerous proposition to start with), every effort should be made to ensure that the picture used matches the character it’s representing. As an example, I once read a book in which the main character was meant to be a natural blond and the bleach blond on the cover had an inch and a half of dark roots–obviously not natural then. (I can’t be the only person who notices this kind of thing.)

Here the narrator goes to some effort to describe the way Tryg keeps his hair short and his face cleanly shaven to avoid the cliché lion-headed appearance (which is probably exactly the impression this particular picture was going for). This means he would likely be displeased with the very image used to represent him on the cover and if the character would be irked by it so am I. Mostly, however, I find it disruptive to look at a cover and be forced to notice discrepancies instead of consistence with the story. The cover is still part of the book, after all.

Description of Beast In Me
Weather worker Cameron Bale rolls into Divination Falls after being prompted by Spirit and Brother Lighting. He discovers that the small, hidden town full of shifters and magical types is suffering a series of unsettling events. There’s speculation from the town seers that he could be the answer they’ve been looking for. Cameron’s willing to try and help: he’s got nowhere to go and nothing to lose. His life is simply about loneliness and it turns out that Trace, a grumpy wolf with stunning eyes, knows just what that feels like. Cam finds himself wishing maybe they could be alone … together. Oh yeah, and battle whatever evil it is that still lurks in Divination Falls.

Review:
While this wasn’t a horrible book, it wasn’t all that great either. I’m really glad that I got it for free. It certainly wasn’t as good as book one. I think the best way to describe it is clumsy and abrupt. The writing is clunky, with pretentious descriptions of emotions substituting for solid, believable emotional developments.

What I mean is that Mrs. Marsden uses heavily evocative language to create artificially poignant responses in the reader. I call it artificial because the plot didn’t allow for the characters to develop the feelings the reader is told they suddenly have for one another. But contradictorily, we’re hit with some lovely imagery that if placed within a more thoroughly and patiently established story could have made for a gripping read.

This is a serious case insta-lust, moving to instant ‘I want to support and heal him’ as step one of insta-love. It’s that second one that really drives me crazy. Insta-lust I can handle. Insta-love I don’t like, but I’ve learned to accept. (They’re shifters after all.) But the whole idea of instantly knowing, trusting, and seeking to meaningfully support another is just too much for me and my distaste for sappy hearts and flowers in general. It’s wholly unsupportable in a plot.

Seriously, this instant connection between the two starts before the two men have even seen eachother’s faces. It’s so abrupt that that the book just feels like a listing of emotions, events and sexual positions with no real story attached.

What’s more, the weak attempt to provide a mystery as a plot was essentially a failure. Seeing Cameron go around and listen to everyone’s stories, when the information could have just been recapped for him, felt like filler. Then he suddenly and almost miraculously knew what to do, with no evidence of an impetuous to his sudden insight. Isn’t that convenient for him?

Add to that so much sex that it actually started to feel redundant and I’m bound to lose interest. (And for the record, I love me some smexy yum-yum. But too much is too much.)

Lastly, and I know this sounds ridiculous, but the whole thing kind of had a bit of a YA feel to it. Cameron went around and met a variety of different shifter and a lot of time (that the book really couldn’t afford to dedicate to such distractions) was spent describing them and their quirks. It gave the whole thing a bit of a Hogwarts/Harry Potter-like feel. By which I mean a ‘lets go see some strange and marvellous mythological creatures just for the amazement factor.’ It didn’t contribute anything to the story and IMO detracted from the already lagging attempt at a plot.

Additionally, Cameron’s tendency to just say anything with no filter and to space out easily and repeatedly, gave him a childlike quality. When paired with the litany of fairytale beasts I’m reminded of young adult (or even middle grade) literature…except for the sex, of course. Lots and lots of sex. It wasn’t a successful combination for me.

Final thought…Ms. Marsen can write. She proved that more book one of the series than here, but she’s proven it. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m a huge fan of what she writes, or rather the relationships she chooses to create. (This is another completely inflexible top/bottom, dominant/submissive pairing, for example.)To each their own, of course, but it’s not topping any of my favourites lists.