Tag Archives: erotica

Book Review of Sleeves, by Chanse Lowell

Sleeves, by Chanse Lowell came from the Amazon free list. (At the time of posting it was still free.)

A friend of mine said to me recently that he was beginning to think that bulging biceps are to women what lush breasts are to men. Hmm, maybe. But for me it’s a well-muscled back. Keeping that in mind, you can probably imagine that this cover appealed to me. I hardly even read the description if I’m honest, just grabbed the pretty picture and went with it.

Description from Goodreads:
Kel isn’t at all the animal locked in a cage that he appears to be. Secrets keep him there, hidden from those who hunt him. But what does a man do when he needs physical contact to survive, but can’t stand the burning pain that comes with another’s touch? He’s found a way to get a small fraction of his needs met at the nightclub, Sleeves. What happens when he lets in an unknown woman with a healing hand? Casey can see past the vulgar mouth to the affection-starved man hiding inside. When she does, all hell breaks loose, and the past finds him. Will he be able to avoid the agency, or will they add Casey to their twisted experiments? She entered the cage with him, and now it seems there’s no way out.

Review:
A previous review referred to this book as a ‘Hot Mess.’ And while Hot Mess isn’t a phrase that I’ve ever found myself tempted to use, I find it describes this book aptly. It’s not that it’s necessarily a bad book, it’s not, it’s just all over the place and full of holes the reader has to overlook to enjoy the story. They are overlookable, but it would be a little ridiculous to pretend they aren’t there.

To start with and probably most importantly, it’s never said but I’m gonna have to assume that Casey has some sort of preternatural power of super-empathy, because nothing in the book makes any sense otherwise. If she doesn’t then she just fell in love with a man who, in their single 30 minute interaction, forced her to jack him off in front of a crowd while calling her a slut, bitch, whore, cunt, and probably more I’ve forgotten. She in turn told him he was a beautiful, sweet man. (WTF!?) So unless she can magically see through his shit, to his kernel of true-self she is either really, really stupid or masochistic.

What’s more, her main strength seems to be in her ability to accept any verbal abuse thrown at her with aplomb and willingly offer up, “anything you need, baby.” Now, I get that this is supposed to show how much she loves Kel and maybe how brave she is. But what it mostly says to me is that she must be one of those women who is so desperate for a man that she will do, become and take anything without complaint. It makes me wonder if she really has any sense of self herself. And while we kind of find out what warped Kel (and I say kind of because it’s not a complete explanation) we don’t really find out what whacked Casey out. Which suggests that we’re not supposed to see her behaviour as inappropriate. (WTF!?) We do get a little of her sob story, but I couldn’t see how it would result in her willingness to accept Kel’s shit (and it is shit) so openly.

I did really like her ability to banter though. She didn’t have Kel’s foul language, but she had no problem slinging a one-shot back at him on occasion. This verbal sparring between the two of them was by far the best part of the book. And it’s good.

Kel in turn swung wildly from angst, clingy teenager to angry, dangerous alpha man with a tenuous grasp on sanity and back again, over and over. Now I’ll give you that when he was in his charming, boyish charm phase he was about as cute as they come. In these moments I really loved him. I even kinda liked his weird clingy, needy side. It was creepy as hell, but still kinda cute. Unfortunately his angry instability was truly scary and his inability to go two sentences without calling Casey some foul name often curled my toes…and not in a good way.

The thing is though, even though his language was deplorable and Casey didn’t deserve to be called all the names she did, it generally just boiled down to a whole heck of a lot of dirty talk. Because the actual sex was pretty clean. It never actually crossed into abusive, as his verbal description would suggest. Plus, even as he was playing Mr. Dominance he never failed to worship Casey and be honest about how much he needed/wanted her, which made it quite obvious that all of the mastery he held in their sexual relation was given to him by her. I found this dynamic damned sexy.

This book is in desperate need of a little world building. It’s set in 2023, so I accept that there should have been some social evolution and scientific advancements. But the reader isn’t ever told what these might be. Everyone did seem to accept the whole ‘a secret organisation experimented on me and is currently hunting me’ with awe-inspiring ease. Not a single person raised an eyebrow at the fact that Kel had some strange sensory issue going on and apparently displayed regular feats of strength on stage, not to mention some truly horrific social skills.

I also have to wonder if another thing that isn’t said, but must be true, is that people are…I don’t know, educated in their sleep or something. I mean Kel was apparently kept in a cage with a filthy, blood stained mattress and little else. So if his basic hygiene wasn’t worth taking into consideration I can’t imagine his education was either. But somehow he was a genius–able to create mysterious genetic cures and micro technologies. How did he learn these skills?

I think the best way to describe this book is what happily ever after would look like if two damaged nymphomaniacs found each-other. The actual sic-fi aspect of the story is a…well, a Hot Mess. It’s never explained what the secret organisation was actually trying to accomplish with Kel, for example, or what the mysterious ‘serum’ does to a person, or how the cure reverses it, or why Kel needs touch, or what will happen if he goes without it, or why it hurts, or why he treats women so badly. But the sex is a lot of fun, and for all their many faults, Kel and Casey are too.

Book Review of Sharon Page’s Erotic Vampire Novel, Blood Red

I grabbed a practically new (maybe even new) paperback copy of this book at the secondhand shop.

Description from Goodreads:
Take a bite of desire…

Althea Yates is a vampire hunter, skilled with the crossbow and the stake. But she knows nothing of a man’s touch—or how to control the unladylike dreams that haunt her sleep. That is when they come, two men of unearthly beauty who ravish her in sweet carnal games, taking her to the precipice of exquisite desire and unimaginable erotic pleasure. It is scandalous. Forbidden. Unholy. For her lovers are not men, but vampires—the very beasts she and her father have sworn to destroy.

It is only a dream…until the elegant carriage arrives at the inn, drawn by four black horses. Until Yannick de Wynter, Earl of Brookshire, alights, silver-eyed, determined, and hungry for something she cannot name. And suddenly, Althea is no longer certain whether she has had a dream… or a dangerously erotic premonition…

Review:
I’m gonna use a star rating here and go with three stars for this book. But that needs to be understood as three stars on the erotica rating scale. I’m not really suggesting there is a whole different grading system for erotica, but we all know to expect less plotting, character development and world-building from an erotica than from, say, literary fiction. So a three star erotica is still going to have less of all of the above and readers accept that as par for the course.

I can sum this book up in seven short words: sex, sex, sex,sex, and more sex. Yep, that’s about it. I realise I can’t reasonable complain about too much sex in an erotica and I’m not. But even by erotic standards the plot was pretty flimsy for a full length book. A lot was left unexplained, such as exactly what special skills Bastien had that was supposed to help him battle Zayan or what exactly vampire were. Somehow demons and Lucifer came into play and I never really figured out how.

So, you’re doing the math in your head, aren’t you? There wasn’t a lot of plot, but the book is 300 pages long. Wow, there really must have been a lot of sex, you think. Yep, and surprisingly the author manages to put enough variety in to keep it from getting too stale. (I admit that by the end I was ready to finish, but I never quite reached the ‘Oh, bloody hell, not another one’ stage.) There is M/F sex, M/M sex, F/F sex, M/F/M sex, a M/M/F/M/M/M orgy, and even a little light bondage, S&M and breeding thrown it. Having said that, some of it just felt a little ridiculous–as if Ms. Page was trying desperately to create situations to add something more. The orgy especially felt this way. You see it coming a mile away, and then just watch it unfold with a mental eye roll and move on.

For all the forced variety there was also a certain innocence to the book. Maybe it’s because it is a couple years old and the current publishing rage is questionable consensuality, forced seduction, heavy BDSM, dominate men and simpering submissive women. I really appreciated that every sex scene in this book is clearly consensual. Althea (what the hell kind of name is that BTW) may be a virgin when she meets Yannick, but she takes to sex with enthusiasm. I did begin to wonder just how much she could experience before she lost that same innocence that the twins love so much, but it’s hardly a point worth thinking too deeply about.

I could have done without the sappy, happy ending. But, all-in-all for a full length erotic novel it wasn’t too darned bad.

Book Review of Alana Davis’ Bonds of Attraction and Livia Royce’s EMMAncipation

Since neither of these books really rang my bell I thought I might combine them into one post. Both came from the Amazon KDP list. You can find Alana Davis’ Bonds of Attraction (still free) here, but Livia Royce‘s EMMAncipation seems to have been removed from Amazon.

Description from Goodreads:
“It was always strictly business. I had never slept with a client. I wasn’t about to start now.”

Julie Facet runs the hottest matchmaking agency in Los Angeles, but she doesn’t quite believe in happily ever afters. Despite the file cabinets full of clients she has found matches for, she isn’t interested in anything beyond simply satisfying her own physical needs. When Julie meets the wealthy Leon Christensen, her professionalism is pushed to the brink. Leon is charismatic and cocky, and does everything he can to get under Julie’s skin. Not to mention that he owns the Poison Ivy, a nightclub that’s designed for every sexual proclivity and uses his own sexuality to push women away.

Will she able to find a suitable partner for Leon, who prides himself in his no-strings-attached relationships?

And what will Julie do when she discovers that her feelings for Leon extend beyond the professional?

Review:
I really like this book’s cover but there are probably readers out there that will enjoy the book itself a lot more than me. Me, I couldn’t figure out where Julie’s attraction came from. Leon was a dick to her from the first moment they met, and that’s really putting it lightly. Then she spends most of the book building elaborate sexual fantasies about him that have nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with the reality of the man she’d met. (By the end I was skimming, if not skipping them.)

Suddenly she ‘has feelings.’ What? She may have fallen in love with her fantasy, but the real deal (who she’d spoken to 3, maybe 4 times) was still calling her a whore and propositioning her in increasingly horrific ways. Unattractive doesn’t start to cover it. I imagine we’re supposed to understand he’s wounded and emotionally damaged. Our soft feminine urges to heal the injured male should be kicking in. Um…no. Just no. And when I thought Julie was finally gonna wise up and walk away he suddenly decided to bear his soul and the hearts and flowers start popping out all over the place. I think I got whiplash from trying to follow his sudden change of heart!

Now, I’ll credit the book with having a lead female that is comfortable with her body, even though it’s curvy and not a stick and with portraying a woman who is unashamed of her own sexuality. That really was refreshing, as was the fact that she wasn’t gagging to give up her control and cater to all of his BDSM fetishes. In fact, the subtext seemed to be that Leon craved the bondage because of his unhealthy self-image and within the confines of a safe, loving relationship a rather more vanilla scene still filled the bill. There are so many Shades Of Grey clones out there that it was nice to see female sexuality as something other than the weak-willed desire to submit and male sexuality as predatory. Don’t get me wrong, there is a little of this but it’s nowhere near as strong as it often is.

I’ll also admit that I might not have hated Leon as much if we were given any of his thoughts, feeling, opinions, etc. But the book is in first person, from the perspective of Julie and the reader isn’t given a single insight into Leon that isn’t mitigated through her. He feels very much like the creepy, life-sized cardboard cutout that she hangs in the corner and dreams about. He has no depth at all.

Add writing like this, “When my eyes finally adjusted to the darkness of the, shock stabbed my heart.” Or instances like the time I counted the word ‘car’ used 8 times in two brief paragraphs and I start to loose the will to read on. These latter matters I really could and would overlook. But I found the interactions between Julie and Leon really quite repulsive. Nope, there wasn’t a lot in this book that attracted me. I expect others to like it and fully acknowledge my opinion to be nothing more than that, but this was definitely not for me.
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