Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Hot Sauce is a love story that focuses on insecurities, specifically those based in class difference, constructed around a fantasy fairy-tale-esque plot structure. A working class boy from midwest moves to the big city, learns from a master chef, becomes a celebrity restauranteur in his own right, and ends up dating the man of his dreams, a rich, gorgeous, well-connected clothing designer from one of the best families in Boston.

Can you smell the insecurities?

Brad is one half of a gay power couple in Boston, unaccustomed to the attention and unable to find equilibrium when in public wih Troy, his debonair and socially-gifted boyfriend. Troy is, through both the narrator’s account and through his demonstrated actions, off his head about Brad, and yet Brad is unsure of his standing in Troy’s life, as if any minute Troy’s tenderness and caring will turn cold and he’ll be discarded.

Complicating matters is Aria Shakespeare, an upper-crust Bostonian who Troy once knew by a different name, prior to Aria acquiring an entirely different sort of crust - the scuzzy, deceitful kind.

As a total aside, I love adopted names like this. I know a few people who rename themselves in truly over-the-top dramatic fashion.I want to ask, do you think anyone will take that tweety name seriously? Or is it all drama? I once knew a drag queen who dubbed herself “Cicada.” You’re an annoying insect? Sure, why not? I have no room to talk, though - I am the Duchess of Cuntington.

Aria tries by any means necessary, including following them to foreign countries, to interfere with Brad and Troy’s happiness, and he cashes in on the most obvious solution to his goal of breaking them up: he targets Brad’s insecurity, and inserts himself neatly as a much better alternative for Troy’s attentions, using Troy, Caroline - Troy’s social harriden of a mother, and anyone else he can find to get what he wants: Troy. Or, more specifically, the attention he’d receive from being with Troy. He wants a piece of Troy’s glamour.

My only frustration with the book was with the imbalance between the narrator’s account of Troy, and the narrator’s account of Brad’s insecurity regarding Troy’s feelings for him. The narration makes it clear in repeated demonstrations that Troy is over the moon for Brad. He wouldn’t greet anyone else in a room full of political contacts until he spoke to Brad first, he would always look for Brad in a room full of people, and he constantly surprised Brad with trips and luxurious outings, and seemed to be a conscientious, giving lover. So as the reader I had no doubts that, despite the interference of the jealous Shakespeare Aria, Troy adored Brad.

But the narrator also cataloged the ways in which Brad felt slighted by Troy, aside from the attentive devotion Troy demonstrated wordlessly. Troy does not use words to describe his feelings; he does much better with the gesture or the gift than he does with the verbal account of his ardor. He is smooth and sophisticated at all turns, except when describing his feelings verbally. Brad, however, desperately wants to hear Troy say The Words, and Troy manages to avoid these verbal exchanges.

Insecurity gets the best of all of us, however, so it’s entirely realistic to watch Brad bank his happiness on whether Troy will tell him the words he longs to hear. Brad certainly has the right to ask for a clear demonstration of how Troy feels about him, without having the moment tainted by the possibility that Troy is really using their good looks and excellent professional partnership for profit and corporate gain, or without leaving Brad any room to question if it’s he himself that Troy loves, or the public image and the sex. Troy is used to being half of several different locally powerful “golden couples,” including a lucrative and somewhat caring partership with his mother, but Brad does not have the healthy ego to accept himself as on par with Troy’s relative celebrity.

Sooner or later you have to choose to believe in the person you love or believe in the snot-nosed coke headed freakshow who is telling you with some funky evidence that the person who you think loves you does not. So do you believe the person who is kind to you or the one who consistently treats you like shit? At what point does one’s own insecurities have to stop and take a look at their silly selves and say, “Wait a minute. I’ve been given no reason to doubt this person except by the word of someone who has never been trustworthy.”

I wish that moment had come a lot sooner than it did for Brad, as he could have saved himself some serious drama. Of course, if Troy had been able to open up and be more honest about his goals and intentions with Brad, perhaps they would have been able to commnunicate better, instead of letting some deceitful freakshow and a mother-in-law come between them. The narrator’s account of Troy, and of Brad’s perception of Troy, were off just enough to make me wonder how Brad could be so blind.

However, the story is as much about Brad’s growth in trusting his partner, and Troy’s growth in his ability to take personal risks in areas in which he’s not entirely comfortable, so in the end, Brad’s growth from insecurity to trust equals Troy’s growth from security to taking personal risks to ensure that security. And their happily ever after, and the just-desserts for Aria, are quite satifying.

Now, for the dishy part.

Y’all. SERIOUSLY. Gay sex. I learned so much about gay sex I can’t even tell you. I mean, in mainstream media one sees depictions of hetero sex all over the place, in various positions and locations. Even ABC, the Ass Broadcasting Network, had in-the-toilet-stall-sex on NYPD Blue, which about made me laugh because, well, EW. Hetero sex, it is everywhere.

But gay sex? Sex between two men? That’s a taboo area that isn’t often depicted, so really, did I have much of a clue what goes on between two dudes? Honestly, no. I didn’t. I have watched porn and seen sexually explicit still images, but descriptions of gay sex? Not really something I’ve encountered so much. Is there equal division between who is on top and who’s on bottom? What are the positional variations? And isn’t there, well, santorum?

I had no clue. But now, I am becoming an educated reader of the gay romance and the accompanying sex scenes. And it’s not like the sex was gratuitous or crass, either. It was genuine and passionate, and pass me that newspaper, ma’am, I need to fan myself. I never thought that gay sex would be hot, but man alive, thems is some hot live men.

So between the hot man action and the genuine, emotional interaction, this is a damn fine romance. Stay tuned for an upcoming review after I read their earlier publication, Spare Parts. 

Because her family, it is The Suck. Her elder sister, Justine, is an egomaniac ball buster who was all set to marry the man of her dreams when the youngest sister, Mica, ran off with him the morning of their wedding. Several years later, Justine is an exec in a makeup company who busts balls and is a general beeyotch to everyone who works with her, until one day the disgruntled wife of one of the (many) married men she sleeps with bursts into her staff meeting and threatens to kill off the employees one by one unless Justine proves that she was or wasn’t with the woman’s husband that afternoon. I won’t go into the manner in which Justine has to prove said activity, but it is quite a scene. Justine barely escapes with her life, and after dealing with the immediate repurcussions of her behavior both in and out of the office, decides on the advice of a kind police officer to head home to North Carolina to see her family, hide out from the yet-uncaptured disgruntled wife, and recuperate.

Mica, meanwhile, ran off to LA with the fiance, Dean, and is now a contracted hair model and minor celebrity, living a very wild and exhausting life. She finds herself confronted with the mess her career and health have become due to Dean’s over-involvement, and her agent, a sensitive man named Everett, directs her to leave Dean, go to the doctor, and take better care of herself, as she is in danger of losing her contract with the hair care company. She decides also to head home to hide from Dean and further heal herself.

The family reunion is set against the backdrop of an unsolved murder that the three sisters witnessed when they were much younger, as the accused and convicted murderer manages to secure a hearing to determine if a conspiracy or inept police work caused his conviction. Ultimately, the sisters have to come forward with what they saw, which further implicates them and damages their already fragile relationships with one another.

So, hello, the Malfunction Sisters are converging on Monroeville, North Carolina, and Regina has to referee the ongoing battles between Mica and Justine, mediate the dissolving partnership and business interests of her parents, assist a hunka-hunka-burnin’ love named Mitchell with the itemization and appraisal of the value of her parents’ antiques store for liquidation purposes, figure out who committed the murder she and her sisters witnessed 20 years prior, and manage to find her own way to happiness.

Regina rules. Loved her. Loved how she learned to ignore her sisters when they were being childish brats - which was far too freaking often - and loved how she learned to appreciate herself even though she felt like no one in her family appreciated her. Loved how she began to appreciate her own value, and recognize her own talents. In short, love how she began to love herself.

I loved the romance between Regina and Mitchell, though I wish he were as full fleshed a character as Regina was, but since this book danced the line between women’s fiction, suspense, and romance so many times I began to accept that he was partly a hero and partly a catalyst for her developing character. Mitchell has his own backstory, and since just about every character is a suspect in the suspense plot woven through the book, his history is a slowly revealed puzzle, which allowed him to be slightly suspicious, even though I knew I could count on his innocence since he was the hero to Regina’s heroine.

But more than anything: I loved the dog. Mitchell has a dog, Sam, who is the best part of the book. While he doesn’t have wild antics and a subtle personality like a Crusie or a Donovan animal sidekick, Sam is a constant and adorable character, lending empathy when needed and serving as an emotional barometer to various scenes.

I read this book straight through in about 24 hours, from two bus rides in and out of Manhattan and an evening on the sofa, and I have to say what hooked me most was Bond’s skill with dialogue. Much of the book is dialogue, and very little description outside of setting the mood of the scene by decribing the environment the characters were in - and more often than not one of the characters did the describing. Bond is skilled with the clever conversation and since I tend to skim paragraphs of exposition in favor of the dialogue when I read, I ended up reading just about every word on the page. 

My problems with this book rest mostly on the development of Justine and Mica. Mica, the youngest, ran off with her sister’s fiance and ended up in a horrible, addictive and abusive relationship with him. Her decision ultimately became her own punishment, so in my eyes she started off even - she’s living the atonement for her major infraction.

But Justine is just horrid. She’s a downright nasty person and has a long, long way to go back to redemption in my eyes, and even as she dances around changing the parts of herself that were so inherently unlikeable, she would still backslide into further sticky territory as a character, forcing me to wonder if she would ever truly be redeemed in my eyes. In the end, I’d have to say she wasn’t, because she managed to make every situation about her, and in the end committed a horrible assault on Mica that seemed, to me, to be far too easily forgiven. Her realization of how shitty her behavior had been throughout the story was not nearly as wrenching as I thought she deserved. She was a witch and I wanted her to pay.

Lastly, still on the “just desserts” topic, while she is a fascinating character and well worth reading about as the middle sister who realizes her own worth is something that she herself has to define, Regina never fully received any real acknowledgement or apology from anyone in her family, from the parents who take her for granted to the sisters who band together despite their own issues to heap abuse on her as if she weren’t really a person worth their consideration. However, Regina’s increased strength and resolve to take care of herself and to not allow her family to hurt her anymore is a much more realistic resolution than to have her family come on bended knee pleading for forgiveness. Family doesn’t change easily, and you can’t really expect a family member to wake up one Afterschool-Special later and realize, “Oh, I’ve been horrible! I must change my wicked ways!” While the part of me that empathized with and rooted for Regina wanted some serious groveling, I have to admit that the novel’s ending did ring true to how real families move past their discord.

This is the first Stephanie Bond book I’ve read, and if they are all like this I’ve got me some glomming to do. I don’t often encounter authors who can effortlessly blend suspense, mystery, romance, women’s fiction, and family drama in a novel that still manages to be somewhat light and certainly funny. I Think I Love You deals with some real issues, and while the romance sometimes takes a backseat to the murder and the family mishegas, the happily ever after is more than satisfying.

But with an influx of criminals comes, well, an influx of crime. The problem is somewhat complicated by a few things:

1. Demons are stronger, faster and smarter than the average bear.

2. Demons are capable of draining a human’s etheric force, and prostitution based on energy vampirism becomes a thriving underground concern in Avvar.

Enter Inspector Adrian Phillips to help deal with these problems. A few years ago, he consented to having special implants inserted in his wrist which, when activated, give him demon-like strength and speed. This comes at a cost: many humans view these implants as abominations, and Adrian finds himself neither fish nor fowl nor meat. In fact, his wife divorces him because of these implants; she fears that he’ll grow a forked tongue and tail as a result of the demon technology.

Because of these enhancements, Adrian is given the task of policing demon-demon and demon-human disputes. However, despite the advantage the implants give Adrian, he finds himself at the losing end of a knife fight one night while looking for a missing boy. Dizzy from loss of blood and exhausted from the aftereffects of activating the implants, he collapses in a garden.

The garden belongs to Roxanne MacAllister, the bastard child of a famous singer and stage performer. Sarah is right on one score: Roxanne is quite the tiresome paragon. She’s an artist who specializes in painting nekkid people and goes around wearing trousers because she’s so radical and different, see, but she also adopts street urchins and rescues grubby, bleeding, unconscious men whom she finds in her garden, in the pouring rain.

Roxanne and Adrian develop the instant hots for each other. And I do mean instant. Erections and gushing moistness abound within minutes of them seeing each other, and lemme tell you, Adrian is able to sport a most impressive woody despite losing God knows how much blood and being only semi-conscious for much of the initial canoodling.

Roxanne is practically vibrating with glee at the idea of finally losing her virginity, but then disaster strikes: she finds out that her father is actually Lord Herrington, the Yamish ambassador to Avvar. Angst ensues. Oh nos! She’s half-demon! And what if she accidentally drinks somebody’s energy? Woe woe woe. But hey, it explains her funny-colored eyes, her amazing strength (bitch single-handedly carried Adrian into her house and she NEVER questioned where her amazing strength came from) and her propensity for mathematics (hey, is she part Chinese too?). Roxanne’s father’s is determined to become better acquainted with his daughter, but she’s not quite as enthusiastic about the idea.

At any rate, Adrian boinks her to a fare-thee-well, even after finding out about her demon father. Additional complications arise when Adrian goes back to work and is warned by his superintendent that associating with dodgy types like Roxanne won’t help with his police career. Adrian tries to stay away, but Roxanne’s supah-sexiness and her all-round awesomeness means he eventually tells the superintendent to fuck off and helps Roxanne out with a sticky situation—with predictable results.

There’s also a side-plot involving a fiendish demon known as The Dragon who’s performing wacky experiments on humans and demons, but unlike previous Emma Holly suspense side-plots, this one didn’t annoy me too much.

OK, so those of you who read Sarah’s F review are probably dying to know: why the drastically different grade?

Frankly, I think it boils down to the fact that I liked Adrian quite a bit better than Sarah did. One of the biggest stumbling blocks for her was how Adrian tried to break up with Roxanne despite how patently awesome she was. Personally, I understood why Adrian tried to do so. Keep in mind that a lot of the mores in Avvar were supposed to be similar to the mores of Victorian England. Two big reasons why I found Adrian’s attempt to break up with Roxanne sympathetic, not obnoxious:

1. He’s middle-class, but his family came from blue-collar working-class roots. Oftentimes, the people most rabid about social position and respectability weren’t the aristocracy; if one was rich enough and powerful enough, one could do whatever the fuck one wanted and other people just had to suck up the consequences. (Think about what royalty got away with, for example.) For the middle class, though, the stakes tied to one’s reputation were much, much higher on a personal scale. Adrian not being comfortable with the idea of dating, much less marrying a) a half-demon bastard of b) a notoriously slutty singer who c) lives in a bad neighborhood and furthermore d) has engaged in what amounts to pornography in e) an era amazingly restrictive and repressed about class, sex and illegitimacy makes perfect sense for me. In fact, I’d be puzzled if he’d had no reservations at all about associating with her. It wouldn’t have been convincing for someone from his era, background and values.

2. He’s really, truly dedicated to his job and wants to get ahead. Part of this entails marrying and associating with the right people. I’ve bitched hard before about how unconvincing I find it when a hard-nosed spy/businessman/cop whose work is his life abruptly tosses everything over for True Lurve without any apparent qualms. That Adrian thought of his job first and foremost made sense to me; after all, at that point all he knew from spending one week with Roxanne was that he liked her and that they’d had amazing nookie. So again, Adrian in this instance acted convincingly for somebody in his situation. I mean, hell, he loved his ex-wife and he got the implants in his wrist to get ahead, even though he knew they would likely freak her out; attempting to break things off with Roxanne before they got too serious made sense to me. In fact, I would’ve been puzzled if he’d been willing to defy his boss and ruin his career for the sake of a woman he’d known only one week.

And then, of course, about 20 pages after Sarah stopped reading, Adrian did the right thing, which cost him dearly. The fact that he came to this decision after a lot of struggle makes the sacrifice a hell of a lot more meaningful, and I’ll admit I teared up a little and sighed a bit.

The world-building in this book is quite excellent—better than just about any paranormal romance I’ve read, actually. Sarah thought it was pretty confusing (and some of our readers agreed with her), but I loved it and didn’t have any problems following along. I have only two complaints with it:

1. I wanted more. The little hints about demon culture and their highly stratified society were delicious, but I wanted more detail.

2. This is a nitpick that is by no means limited to Holly, but: what the hell is up with the dumb-ass names, man? Avvar for a London analogue? Why didn’t she pick something that sounded British, at least? And some of the names of foreign countries just sound far too similar to each other to denote distinct cultures and geographic spaces. Fantasy authors do this all the time, though, with Robert Jordan being one of the worst offenders. But then not everyone can build worlds like Tolkien—my reservations about Lord of the Rings aside, the man was a genius when it came to giving each region distinct, realistic names, languages and cultures.

Side note: Was anyone else as distracted as I was with the use of the word “daimyo” to denote upper-class demons? ‘Cause every time I read that word, I couldn’t help but picture this:

I don’t know if Holly’s use of this word was deliberate because she wanted in some ways to emulate the rigid hierarchies of feudal Japan, or whether she made up a word that just coincidentally meant something in Japanese.

Those are petty nitpicks, though. My biggest reservations with the book had to do with the overall tone and the erotic elements.

First, the tone: Holly has a very American writing voice. This is something I’ve learned to ignore with most romances set in England, and as long as no egregious errors are made (such as having eighteenth-century English aristocrats say “OK") I’m usually fine. In this case, if the voice had been consistent throughout, the story was good enough that I would’ve been able to ignore it much of the time. However, the extremely American tone was occasionally interrupted by attempts to sound British, which jarred me.

The erotic elements were similarly jarring. Roxanne and Adrian’s instant lust for each other was ludicrous, not sexy. The dude was stabbed, for crying out loud. Couldn’t he rest for a couple of days before sporting blue-steel boners that would’ve made John Holmes envious? The sex became more convincing later in the book and the relationship between Roxanne and Adrian developed, but those early encounters made me laugh instead of turning me on. One graphic description of Roxanne’s camel-toe (a result of her tight pants) had me howling so loudly that my husband looked up from playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to ask me what the hell was going on.

Overall, I’d recommend this book to people who enjoy steampunk, and to those who are willing to overlook some very silly sex and a hero who acts like a bit of an asshead for part of the book. It’s a fun, sexy read, and I really hope that Holly sets more books in this world; if nothing else, I’m very curious about what happens to Charles, one of the street urchins Roxanne adopted and a former child prostitute.

Then Dunnan gets his fool self killed. (But of course he does. He’s mean to horsies! And he enjoys killing other people! Such a character cannot be long for the world in a romance novel, particularly if he’s married to the heroine.) Moncrief also finds out that his brother has died, making him the Duke of Lymond. He resigns from the army, returns to Scotland, and though he knows it’s a bad, bad idea, finds himself paying a visit to the widow.

Catherine Dunnan is a royal mess. Harry’s death has sent her into a spiraling depression, and along the way she’s developed quite the laudanum addiction. When Moncrief finally meets her, he finds her condition disturbing, but she’s still attractive, of course—drug-addicted romance novel heroines still look good even if they’re sallow and skeletal. When he returns the next day to deliver a spurious last letter from Harry to help comfort her despair, he finds that she’s deep in the throes of Happy Overdose Land.

He immediately takes steps to shock her back to consciousness, but in the process sees her in nothing more than her nightgown, and even worse, has to undress her. This, of course, is an unacceptable state of matters, so he marries her on the spot.

The problem is, Catherine remembers none of this when she regains consciousness. The overdose, the measures Moncrief took to drag her out of her drug-induced coma, the hasty wedding—none of it. But for better or worse, she’s now the Duchess of Lymond and a newlywed when she hasn’t even reconciled herself to being a widow.

Moncrief’s aloofness and autocratic manner irritate Catherine, while Catherine’s obsession with Harry’s letters chaps Moncrief’s hide. Gradually, though, Catherine learns that the real Harry is quite at odds with the man she had fallen in love with in the letters. Since Harry left for the Lowland Scots Fusiliers a mere month after the wedding, it’s not as if she had much time to get to know Harry’s true character.

Overall, I enjoyed the book quite a bit. The characters were engaging, the plot was interesting, and Ranney’s writing style is quite beautiful, but it lacked that special punch that would’ve made it a keeper. Catherine’s drug addiction was particularly interesting to me. It’s not very often that romance novel heroines are allowed such self-destructive behavior, but her descent into it and her recovery are skimmed over when I wanted more grittiness. And ultimately, in a weird twist provided by an out-of-nowhere suspense side-plot, we find out that her addiction wasn’t necessarily her fault anyway. That struck me as sort of cop-out; I would’ve found Catherine a much more interesting, nuanced character if the dependency (and her insistent denials that she wasn’t an addict) had been all her.

Also, the way Catherine handles the revelation that Moncrief truly was the letter-writer was just a bit too calm for my tastes. This is a situation just begging for some high drama, and Ranney has certainly demonstrated that she can write these sorts of things with a very deft hand—my two favorite books by Ranney (actually, these are two of my favorite romance novels, period), Upon a Wicked Time and My Beloved certainly didn’t shy away from drama—so I’m not sure why Ranney avoided it this time. Like To Love a Scottish Lord, a bit more Sturm und Drang would’ve been appropriate. This is ironic because many romance novels have the exact opposite problem: too much melodrama over small, inconsequential issues.

Catherine’s relative calmness when she finds out the true identity of the letter-writer is a contrast with her far more believable reaction when her former in-laws, Harry’s parents, come for a visit and start making insinuations about her lack of devotion to Harry’s memory while praising his name to the skies at every opportunity. She loses her temper and tells everyone off who has been giving her a hard time, and it’s one of the most entertaining scenes in the story. If Ranney had been able to impart that level of energy, snappiness and depth to the rest of the book, I would’ve liked it even better than I did. As it stands, though, this book is certainly no slouch, and it’s definitely worth a read if you’re a sucker for stories involving unrequited love.

That’s the short version. The long version goes thusly: The heroine, Audrey, is introduced to the delights of BDSM when she meets a much, much older banker named Sterling while vacationing in Florida. She abandons everything—her job, her friends, her apartment in Washington D.C.—to literally become this man’s sex slave. However, after a few months, she realizes that what she has with Sterling isn’t exactly what you’d call a healthy relationship, so she makes like an Aerosmith song and runs away, runs away from the pain, yeah yeah yeah yeah.

(Sorry. If it’s any consolation, now I have it stuck in my head, too.)

Sterling, on the other hand, isn’t quite ready to let go and takes steps to keep Audrey under his control, even from a distance. He not only sends somebody to track her every move and take photos, he calls a senator who owes him a favor and asks him to keep Audrey safe (and untouched) until Sterling is ready to claim her. The senator in turn contacts his son, Patrick, who coincidentally is also into BDSM. The senator isn’t pleased with the implied blackmail, and tells Patrick he’ll be happy if things don’t turn out quite as Sterling planned.

Audrey, in the meanwhile, has run back into the arms of her best friend, Tommy. Frankly, I liked him better than Patrick, who’s yummy but a pretty standard romance novel hero—tall, dark, commanding, massive wang-a-doodle, etc. etc. Hot, but nothing too special. Tommy, on the other hand, is skinny, very sweet, great in the sack AND a computer geek. RRROWR. Audrey, of course, prefers the tall, dark, commanding, massive wang-a-doodle type, and more than that, she likes ‘em to spank her and chain her up. That doesn’t prevent her from having some scorching-hot fun of the “everything but putting Tab A in Slot B” variety with Tommy (who’s been in love with her since they were kids) while staying at his apartment.

Soon, however, she realizes that that somebody is tailing her. She ducks into a bar, Dugan’s, which is owned by—surprise, surprise—Patrick, who is quite startled to see the woman he’s supposed to keep tabs on. He hires her as a waitress, but he’s determined to keep her closer and ultimately wants her to move in with him. To help her feel more secure about accepting and also to throw off Sterling’s spies, he asks his cross-dressing lounge singer, Basil, to be his beard and temporary roommate. Uncomfortable with Tommy’s burgeoning feelings for her and feeling increasingly unsafe, Audrey agrees to move in with Patrick and Basil.

That’s when the REAL fun begins, starting with when she finds out that Basil isn’t gay, he’s bisexual, and the fun really kicks up when she finds out that Patrick isn’t a homo either, he just plays one on TV.

I gotta give Holly credit: she actually made BDSM sexy to me. While I find certain aspects of it appealing, I don’t find the whole pleasure-in-pain thing all that sexy. It didn’t help that my introduction to BDSM erotica was with A.N. Roquelaure’s Beauty series, which features lots of outright rape and sexual torture, some of it pretty brutal. Velvet Glove didn’t bruise any of my tender sensibilities, since it mostly concentrated on the bondage and domination aspects, not so much sadism and masochism. All of the sex scenes in this book are scorching hot, and some of the scenes with Tommy (and Tommy’s girlfriend)…. Oh my.

One of the best things about the book is Basil. He’s flamboyant but not flaming; with a character like that, the temptation must be there to turn him into Divine. Thank God Holly avoided that particular pitfall. I also liked how Basil coaxed Patrick along the road to man-on-man nookie, because unlike the two primary males in Strange Attractions, Patrick isn’t bi to begin with, and has to learn to accept sex with another man. In a real sense, we get to see Patrick lose his virginity.

Audrey is quite charming; like Charity of Strange Attractions, she’s a free spirit and a pocket hedonist. The two of them are virtually interchangeable, really, except that Audrey is a bit younger. I do find it refreshing that a woman gets to have lots and lots of hot, sweaty, slutty fun throughout the book and still come up the winner, because the preponderance of literature tends to hammer home the message that sluts (female sluts, anyway) are either mentally imbalanced, evil or deserving of death for having unsanctioned orgasms. I do hope the next Emma Holly heroine I encounter will be different, though, because I’ll tire of non-stop Charity/Audrey clones real quick.

Patrick is also quite appealing. Like I said, he’s quite standard romance novel hero material—poor baby was abandoned by mommy and has problems forming attachments, boo hoo hoo—but Holly takes care to show how different his Mastering technique is from Sterling’s. In other words: Patrick is alpha, but not an asshole. Yay! However, I do wish Holly would stop belaboring certain aspects of his appearance, like his twinkling eyes; yes, I get it, they twinkle. Twinkle twinkle, like little stars. Puh-leeease.

But the part that really made my eyes roll in the book is the short erotic story Patrick tells Audrey while engaging in one of their games. It has a certain 1001 Arabian nights flavor, which is all right, but swear to God, the phrase “fleshy sword” is used, not just once, but a few times. That term should be outlawed from romance novels of any sort. I hope this is not an indication of Holly’s historical voice, because I have her two Victorians winging their way to me from Amazon.com as I write this.

As a villain, Sterling is pretty standard romance novel stuff. He’s kind of nuts, although in an interesting twist that most romance novels don’t feature, he’s the one who gives Audrey all the initial lessons about pleasure, instead of the hero. And speaking of villains: There is a completely extraneous chapter featuring the photographer/gumshoe Sterling sics on Audrey that could’ve easily been cut from the book. It adds absolutely nothing to the story, and it actually gives the impression that this guy is going to play a much larger role than he does. Instead, we briefly see him acting all skeezy and creepy, then poof, no mention of him ever again for the rest of the book.

The romance itself is believable, and in some ways is more fully fleshed-out than the love story in Strange Attractions. Not having a suspense plot and quantum mechanics to mangle gave her a bit more room to develop the relationship, I think, and there are a few vignettes in which we see Audrey and Patrick just hanging out and enjoying each other’s company even though they’re not taking part in any sexual games. Brief though these scenes are, they do establish that these people genuinely like each other instead of being enamored merely with the hot monkey sex. And that is probably why I enjoy Emma Holly’s books so much: not only does she smash all sorts of taboos with great panache and glee, and not only is the sex explicit and well-written, but the protagonists are extremely likeable, the story is generally well-written and I close the book with that warm, fuzzy, satisfied feeling an HEA ending gives me.