Review: Hot Under The Collar by Jackie Barbosa

Hot Under The Collar was purchased in 2012 and then promptly placed in the TBR pile where it languished until recently. When Courtney Milan suggested we all review Jackie Barbosa's work as a show of support, I had already begun reading it. (The problem I have with Jackie Barbosa is that I love her voice but I've lost interest in erotic fiction. When we're out of bed, she's one of my favorite authors. When we hit the sheets she's just as skilled but I'm wandering off.) With all of those caveats and disclaimers in place, I really enjoyed Hot Under The Collar.

Barbosa avoids a number of pitfalls in her fairly conventional setup of reluctant Vicar and former Courtesan. The first, of course, is that the pairing is completely expected. Vicars never seem to fall for young women of deep faith and enduring piety. The second is that Artemisia, the courtesan in question, is not unknown to Walter, our vicar. Before his injury in the military Walter was an underfunded pleasure seeker who admired Artemisia from afar. There was a danger that she would be something he earned, the nice guy rewarded with the dream girl. Barbosa does a good job of having them earn each other. Artemisia is lonely, yes, but she's not desperate. Walter is not obsessed with her because of her former status but because he enjoys her as she is then and now.

Hot Under The Collar presents two facts about Artemisia and Walter early then leaves them alone. Walter's injury is manageable. He's not impeded in his life nor obsessed with it. There's no detailed scar kissing scene or wallowing in man pain. He got shot, it sucked, he moved on. For Artemisia's part she was ruined and subsequently is infertile. These are facts in her life, not tragic flaws. Walter explains he cares about neither and he means it. She doesn't run and hide from who she is or from his acceptance of it. The objections and obstacles to their relationship are appropriate and appropriately dealt with. I understood the reason for one late arrival's introduction but he wasn't needed. Walter's discovery that true faith adds to lives instead of diminishing them worked without it.

If Barbosa ever decides to write a full length standard Regency I'm completely in.

* This review originally appeared at Love In The Margins.

DNF Review: Buttercup by Sienna Mynx

The Kindle Sample for Buttercup consists of the prologue and a few sentences from the first chapter. I wish the sample had been longer,  because I don’t know that the prologue is a fair representation of the novel. If it is, then Buttercup absolutely isn’t for me. Having a weakness for both the 1930′s and sideshow life I expected to enjoy Buttercup. Instead I struggled to complete the sample.

When we meet Silvio and Buttercup she is dancing on stage and he is masturbating. (I somehow missed that this is an erotic romance, and not a romance with erotic elements.) For reasons I didn’t understand they progress to a one on one physical encounter. Through his arousal, Silvio reflects on events, events that apparently separated them. Here I was confused. Silvio has “bedded the whore, the virgin, the widow” but he is angry that Buttercup may not have been faithful to him. He’s had to seek her out, indicating they were not in communication, but here she is dancing (and disrobing) for him with barely a word.

Because Silvio is revealing their story between “slick sheens of sweat” it was hard for me to stay interested. It seems that Buttercup did something six years ago that endangered Silvio’s life. Four years ago he got out of prison. Two years were spent with his gang, searching for Buttercup while also trying to forget her. Buttercup is apparently indebted to, and protected by, the carnival she works with. She is such a fantasy figure in this prologue that I wasn’t sure she was real. At the end of the prologue is seems clear that this is meant to represent an actual encounter, not a dream of Silvio’s. I also wasn’t sure of the timeline of past events.

“Buttercup was different than in the past, but she was a girl of barely seventeen and he was a kid himself. He paid it no mind. They had both changed. His mind was on one thing. Reclaiming what was taken from him prematurely.” – Kindle Location 219, Buttercup by Sienna Mynx

I think this passage means she is twenty-three, but I had to read it twice. My initial pass seemed to indicate that she’d been eleven during their prior sexual encounter. I know Sienna Mynx is very popular and Buttercup was suggested to me by several different fans but I didn’t purchase the book. As a set up for an erotic novel, the world of a 1930′s carnival is fresh and original. If I were looking for an erotic read I probably would have been more interested than I was. I needed a contrast between Silvio’s sexual needs and who Buttercup is as a person. Because she felt like a fantasy, and he a stalker, I DNF’d the book and moved on.

* This review originally appeared at Love In The Margins

Review: Table For Three (New York) by Lainey Reese

And thus ends the porn vs erotic romance debate.

About a million years ago (okay, it was the early 90's) I had a gig reviewing m/m romance (totally in it's infancy) and porn with pretensions, now known as explicit erotica. In many ways these two have merged into one market. I'm going to be honest and tell you I didn't finish A Table For Three. Halfway through is really all I needed to know. Having long argued that we should call porn, romance and erotica what they are, I felt if I was going to keep having an opinion on the topic I needed to catch up. Over the last few months I've read about twenty 'hot' reads from various publishers. I'm caught up, and my opinion hasn't changed. (Also, if I could go another decade or two in blissful ignorance of where the pornrotica market goes, that would be AWESOME, thank you very much.)

I am not here to judge people getting their kink on. I am not here to argue the porn debate. I am not here to say anything but let's stop pretending there's a romance element to hardcore explicit erotica. A Story of O? 9 1/2 Weeks? Beauty's Punishment? Anything by Anias Nin in her frisky phase? They may have relationship elements but they are not romance. Romance is about finding the best in each other, not the best ways to pork each other. (I'm sorry, was that rude?) After wading through the unspeakable Medusa's Folly, Naughty Bits 1 & 2, Alison's Wonderland and a grab bag of assorted books by other publishers I've chosen A Table For Three as my stopping point. It reminds me of the early 90's when m/m romance was only sold in certain stores.

The heroine of A Table For Three (in the last hour I've forgotten all their names, this points to the emotional impact they don't make) is exactly the sort of girl you expect Ron Jeremy (ew, why did I do that to myself?) to pick up in the first four seconds of an adult film. She is constantly hot for it, made out of rubber, lacks any common sense at all, and is obviously a stand in for a well trained dog. She's not a fully developed woman, she's a composite of traits assembled to resemble a woman for the purposes of furthering the male relationship. The men would make excellent date rapists, but instead they left the Ivy League to run a sex club where they can meet and (oh so gently!) coerce women into having sex with them since having sex with each other would make them gay. Even though they share intimacy, apartments, trips, businesses and fashion tips - the final barrier for them is banging each other instead of the chick. (Maybe they change their mind later in the book, I don't know.) She meets one of the guys, bangs him in public within ten minutes (despite having only limited sexual experience - two guys who were in and outers) goes upstairs with him, and by morning she's willing to bang his friend as well.

By the next day, she's ok with all the BSDM she never knew about, living with them like a house pet, and taking her punishment like the 'little one' they name her. The diminishing nickname fits. Our heroine is not the only woman I encountered. As a counterpoint to the completely submissive and startlingly elastic heroine with a pure heart (She only wants the sex!) we have a bitter waitress who has known the boys since they were young and had finally (Finally, I tell you!!) put herself in a position to be showered with gifts for banging them (Not in it for the sex! Evil!) while she plots to have their child, forcing 18 years of support! (OMGZ! Sperm Stealer!) When she realizes our doe eyed young ingenue has swept these closeted lovers off their feet she realizes she's got to eliminate her rival!

Ok, so we have two rich men that love each other (and set up charities for children, of course) while catering to rapists and the like in their sex club (that's a whole other paragraph) and the young undereducated stacked sexpot fresh off the bus who asks the taxi driver to take her somewhere - somewhere she decided to bang a guy in public and then learn about oral sex before taking his roommate on as well, and a crazed child support craving aging working class jade out for cash and prizes. Oh yea, I feel the love. How could I ever have equated explicit erotica with homoerotic porn, which is so anti female? I dunno. I'm just like that, I guess. Dude, Mr. Benson had a more believable love.

Now to be fair, because it's not Lainey Reese's fault she's the final nail in my updating the market coffin, she is getting high reviews for a reason. Many of these books make no pretension to competence, much less attempting a plot. Lainey Reese is in the higher tier of writers both from my random samplings and my prior experience. She's working it, and she's working hard. If you're looking for porn that won't make you get out a red pencil and start editing, you're good to go. I, for one, hope to remain in blissful market ignorance for some time to come as I return to my "know it when I see it" stance.

Review: Medusa's Folly by Alison Paige

It has been suggested to me that I am a snob. Several books have been presented to me as Worthy Reads that I have rejected because I think they're probably dreadful reads. Unwilling to pay for the Alison Paige book suggested to me, I paid for a short story instead. Erotic elements have been a much larger part of romance over the last decade or so as they get redefined as making the read 'hot' or increasing the emotional connection between the characters.

(It is interesting to me, if I can take a side road for a moment, how the politics of sex and romance change over the years. In the 80's we had the sweet books, the rape books, and the interracial books. Now we have the inspirational books, the hot reads, and the erotic books. Interracial relationships are pretty much gone, even the horrible depictions from the plantation novels.)

You know the classic definition of pornography, right? I know it when I see it? I am not sure why it is unacceptable to call something porn. If romance cannot be labeled 'porn for women' (and I agree, it should not be) then what should porn for women be called if not, well, porn for women? Erotica is a different animal - it is something that rises above it's primary goal of sexual titillation to successfully portray deeper dynamics of human relationships. While I don't care for Megan Hart, I do think she clears that bar. Anne Desclos clears that bar with both her work The Story of O and it's repudiation, Return to Roissy.  (There is some controversy over the author of the second work. I find it brilliant in it's splintering of the fairy tale O has sold herself in the first.) Mr. Benson clears the bar for John Preston. Alison Paige takes the bar in the gut.

I don't know why that has to be a pejorative judgement. As porn, individual taste is individual taste. I am certain there are people who are perfectly content to read about greek goddesses leaving snail trails of 'cream' on acid rain bathed gargoyles without needing it to say anything more than that. Porn is where the money is. As a story, judged as more than a temporary shelter for a sexual offering, Medusa's Folly completely failed me. The initial explanation, that Medusa is so hungry for gratification that she must cling with desperation to whatever she can find makes no sense to me. If she has (as she suggests) been sexually involved with men she then met the gaze of (turning them to stone) mid act, one would think she has quite a collection of stone partners. With about five minutes consideration, she could easily create a way to have sex with human men without meeting their gaze. Her desperate hunger for human contact falls flat.

We will grant that she has run about checking to see if any of the gargoyles are up for it. So now we have Medusa, created to seek the destruction of all men because of her anger at her long ago rapist, and this stone dude who suddenly comes to life because.... that's not important. He was created by another goddess for failing to grant her sexual favors when he was obviously a man-whore and totally up for it with everyone else. Pissed her off. (Nobody seeks his consent, isn't that rape?) Turns out she's Medusa's mother. (Figures.) With one meeting of the eyes, Medusa and Uphir have fallen in love. Because they do, whatever, it's an eternal and devoted love. Mom doesn't understand. So she makes a deal. If they revoke their god status, they can be together. Of course they do. Because otherwise neither of them can ever have human sex again.

(Another side note - yesterday Amazon was selling this title. Today it disappeared from title search results, but was still on the author's search results. This evening it is no longer for sale to US customers. Is Amazon feeling some Kindle article heat? I don't know. Amazon has been good to me, we're cool.)

Anyway, I'll take a pass on the more expensive book. I know what I like and I'm just not interested in porn. Erotica I'll consider, but I prefer books about human relationships in their emotional and psychological complexity. Maybe one day we will understand why, as women, we can't just have porn. Maybe we'd spend less time defending conventional romance if we stopped trying to make the umbrella big enough to encompass every possible description. Maybe not. People do love to hate books where woman are respected or valued. Almost as much as they love to award ones where they are abused and thrown aside with the trash.