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| Jan 07, 2021
| Jan 07, 2021
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it was ok
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2024 reads, #33. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kin
2024 reads, #33. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in order to stay on top of the latest trends so to better help my freelance clients who publish under the same circumstances. In this case you can think of the story as being essentially half-and-half a romance novel and a cozy mystery novel, about a young woman who accidentally reconnects with a man from her childhood who used to brutally bully her (it’s okay -- it was actually his pushy girlfriend at the time who forced him to do it), but who then discovers halfway through the book that her estranged father who she’s never met is actually a serial killer, and is back in town to make her life a living hell. To its credit, this book has the opposite problem from most quickie Kindle Unlimited reads -- it’s not way too short but rather way too long -- but that nonetheless results in a problematic reading experience, with lots of scenes that should’ve been just summed up in a single sentence (“like Bob had mentioned, the blood test down at the hospital only took ten minutes”) but that instead go in excruciating detail for pages upon pages (“We arrived at the hospital. Bob opened the door. I walked through the door. We asked the receptionist where room 116 was. She told us to go down the hall and take a right. We went down the hall and took a right”...). Combined with a plot that’s pretty easy to guess, and a writing style that’s fairly pedestrian (be prepared for every character to be the ur-archetype of whatever kind of person they represent -- the gay guy’s the gayest gay who’s ever gayed, the villain is the most villainous villain who’s ever villained), that results in a book that was just barely mediocre in this case, which is why it’s getting 2 stars out of 5 when usually I give so-so Kindle Unlimited novels 4 stars so to embrace the lowered expectations of this form of publishing. Go into it, if at all, with this warning in mind. ...more |
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| Dec 12, 2020
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liked it
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2024 reads, #24. I picked this up as part of my ongoing efforts to read deeply and widely within the world of quick genre novels published through Kin
2024 reads, #24. I picked this up as part of my ongoing efforts to read deeply and widely within the world of quick genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, as a way of helping out my freelance clients who write and publish under the same circumstances. It’s a short erotic bisexual MMF story, about a couple who own a restaurant and have a night of naughty fun with their new sous chef. (Hint: the name of the series this is a part of, “Swords Will Cross,” tells you a lot about what you can expect.) It’s...you know, it’s fine, although one thing I’ve noticed about most quickie erotica published through Kindle Unlimited (especially when being shelved in the “romance” category like this one is) is that, no matter how kinky the subject matter, the actual sex scenes all tend to be just plain ol’ boring middle-class suburban vanilla intercourse, even when that’s two men and a woman having boring suburban vanilla intercourse, two lesbians having boring suburban vanilla intercourse, a master and a slave having boring suburban vanilla intercourse, etc. That’s the same case here, which is why it’s getting a thorough and solid “meh” from me, three stars to reflect its “eh, I suppose this is fine for a boring Wednesday afternoon” nature. It should be read, if at all, with these low expectations in mind.
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| B0CXGKF85P
| 4.82
| 22
| unknown
| Apr 14, 2024
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #21. As always with these kinds of books, let me mention first that I was its editor, and was paid to work on it and make it better, so yo
2024 reads, #21. As always with these kinds of books, let me mention first that I was its editor, and was paid to work on it and make it better, so you should read my thoughts here based on that context, and understand that I'm presenting far from an objective, removed opinion in today's writeup. That said, I really enjoyed this romance novel just as a regular reader! The main strength of Banks here is that she does "small town romance" right, concentrating not on all the capitalist opportunities inherent in such a small town (no mentions of adorable B&Bs or delightful cupcake stores here), but rather understanding that it's the quiet solitude and tight-knit community that makes these kinds of books enjoyable to read, really putting an emphasis here on the ways the citizens of this fictional small town (supposedly on the rural outskirts of Nashville) interact with each other. I also thought she got the balance between plot and sex almost exactly right here, sacrificing neither of these elements for the sake of the other; and she has a nicely unique plot going on here as well, telling a "second chance" story about a woman who leaves their small community to become a chef, just to come back to start her own restaurant and have it burn down on opening night (comprising the first chapter of this book), to discover that her rescuer is none other than her former flighty ex-boyfriend, who in the ensuing years since their youthful breakup has finally gotten his act together (mostly because of getting his next girlfriend after her accidentally pregnant, and finding that fatherhood agrees with him), now the widely admired chief of the town's fire department and sole central station (where she ends up accepting a job as the station's new cook, which is what brings them together again). A story with a really nice undercurrent of conflict, as the two renegotiate their relationship now as mature and more world-weary middle-agers, I found myself deeply rooting for the FLC and MLC to get together, even knowing that it's a romance novel so of course they'll eventually have a Happily Ever After; and that to me is a great sign of a well-done romance, when you know the inevitable ending but get caught up in the "will-they-won't-they" drama anyway. Strongly recommended for fans of small-town romance and second-chance stories. ...more |
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Apr 16, 2024
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Apr 16, 2024
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| B0BK5BRFJK
| 4.41
| 121
| unknown
| Nov 08, 2022
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really liked it
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2024 reads, #11. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having
2024 reads, #11. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having a growing amount of clients in my freelance editing career who write these same kinds of books, and with me wanting to keep up with the latest trends. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my write-ups. Today's book is fine in that way that would get it three stars in any other circumstances, but four stars as a romance novel since that's all anyone's ever hoping from Kindle Unlimited books, that they aren't actively terrible. It's a science-fiction novel, the fourth in an entire series, with a substantial amount of backstory; although unfortunately, despite author Kaylee Pike giving this away as a standalone book, she didn't bother to actually explain any of the backstory here in volume number four, which means that you're kind of taking guesses at what's going on here besides the very general information common to all of these kinds of books, "Sassy human woman develops fascination for red-skinned hunky alien with gigantic horse cock" (because space aliens in romance novels always have cocks the size of a horse). I suppose that's all you really need to know here, although it would've been nice if Pike hadn't assumed that her readers had already read the first three books in the series, because the universe she's created here seems pretty interesting, and I would've liked to have known more about what the relationship exactly is between these aliens and the occasional human characters we see. Oh well, I guess!
...more
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| B0C71Y818L
| 3.41
| 337
| unknown
| Jul 05, 2023
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really liked it
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2024 reads, #9. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having
2024 reads, #9. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having a growing amount of clients in my freelance editing career who write these same kinds of books, and with me wanting to keep up with the latest trends. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my write-ups. Today's book is a perfectly serviceable if not pedestrian omegaverse tale, by which I mean it takes about a short story's worth of plot and marries it to about half a dozen sex scenes, the whole thing written with a new paragraph break after every single sentence in order to pad out the page count; and while that would usually get three stars from me in any other context, I've decided to start giving these kinds of romance novels four stars instead, because "serviceable" is all anybody wants and expects from these Kindle Unlimited romance novels in the first place, just something to help pleasantly kill about four to six hours of one's life without being too incredibly insulting to one's intelligence. I have to admit, I continue to be obsessed with the omegaverse subgenre in romance, because of its goal to bring together what seems like to me two diametrically different ideas that you would think couldn't work with each other, where fans get all the thrills of a violent rape fantasy but all the teddy bears and pink balloons of a normal romance novel, basically by positing a paranormal universe where humans essentially "go into heat" like animals do, thus allowing you to still have Mister Perfect Nice Guy as the male lead character but who also simply can't help himself from grabbing any woman closer than a few feet from him and aggressively having his way with her. (Remember, if a man ever pushes a woman to the ground and then violently takes her from behind, just to later wash her hair in the bathtub, you know you're reading an omegaverse novel.) When it comes to that, this book delivers the fetish just fine, but doesn't bother or even aim to be the tiniest bit better than simply a fetish delivery vehicle, which is why these kinds of books come and go from the Kindle Store in the blink of an eye like the disposable tissues they are. Read it or not with this understanding before you pick it up. ...more |
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| 1556010044
| 9781556010040
| 1556010044
| 3.34
| 41
| Jan 2002
| Jan 01, 2002
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did not like it
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2023 reads, #101. I'm getting geared up to finally write out the post-apocalyptic Proud Boys BDSM "dubious consent" erotic romance novel I've had outl
2023 reads, #101. I'm getting geared up to finally write out the post-apocalyptic Proud Boys BDSM "dubious consent" erotic romance novel I've had outlined for the last six months (the project being an attempt to advertise my skills as a freelance romance editor); and to get myself more into the mindset of the alt-right guys who run the "New Sparta" post-apocalyptic settlement where my story takes place, I've started tearing through a bunch of books I once found grouped together on the Pirate Bay under the title "The Red Pill Collection." This particular title is one of those incel "how to trick women into sleeping with you" books; there are a lot of these kinds of books in this Red Pill Collection, over a dozen altogether, so sort of nakedly shows what's on the mind of most of these young alt-right men, along with bodybuilding and personal finance among other niche interests. This one is at least unlike the other incel books I've now read in that it doesn't try to soften or normalize its very aggressively sexist message by even the tiniest bit; author Gary Brodsky just flat-out hits the ground running right at the very beginning by letting us know that women are easily confused morons who mostly are only good for breeding, and here's a guide into tricking their lizard brains into opening their legs for you, so you can implant your seed. It's crude, and it's offensive, I'll give you that; but now that I'm in my fifties and have like half the testosterone in my bloodstream as I used to in my twenties, I can also look back with extremely clear eyes now and understand just how much of my twenties were in fact dedicated solely to this subject, of getting my penis into as many warm, wet holes as I could back then (no matter how that manifested from one night to the next). This is simply a part of having a huge amount of testosterone and estrogen in your system; these are hormones specifically designed to encourage breeding, so make you kind of crazy about the subject so that you're going around humping everything that moves. So is it actively evil to have such a naked flat-out guide to this subject written out in black-and-white form like this? Eeehhhhhhhhhhhhnmmmmmaybe not really? Isn't much of the free time of most people in their twenties already devoted either to rutting like pigs or convincing your body with your own hands that you are? Aren't a lot of the rituals of our twenties already based around these opportunities to indulge these hormones? What you think the answers to these questions are will also tell you whether you should read one of these undisguised Red Pill-oriented guides to the subject; but certainly the advice in a book like this works, I can confirm by being in my mid-fifties and now having four decades of sexual activity in my life. You can have a lot of sex using these tactics that will mostly be kind of unsatisfying (but admittedly with a few high points), often substance-fueled and blurry and happening in the middle of the night, which you then immediately regret the next morning; so if you're in your early twenties and this is exactly the kind of sex life you're looking for, then more power to you, I suppose. ...more |
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Dec 09, 2023
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| B0CJ8ZNWNP
| 3.92
| 40
| unknown
| Oct 24, 2023
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really liked it
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(Ethical disclosure: I am part of a group of people who receive early free copies of all of Drusilla Swan's books, in return for a promise to post an
(Ethical disclosure: I am part of a group of people who receive early free copies of all of Drusilla Swan's books, in return for a promise to post an honest review.) 2023 reads, #78. This was kind of an interesting reading experience, in that it's actually book #3 of the "shapeshifting horny billionaire werewolves" series Swan is publishing these days, but I didn't get to read the first two volumes because of this being her first book since I joined her ARC reading group. So that made my read an exploration of a kind of fascinating question, which is exactly how much do you need to know about a series of romance novels, anyway, in order to understand what's going on in any one volume from the series? For example, I wasn't sure at first whether our female lead character is supposed to be an unhappy member of an Amish community or a religious cult that simply dresses like an Amish community (it's the latter, turns out), or whether this was supposed to be set back in the 1800s or is a contemporary tale (contemporary, I realized after coming across a reference to this cult running a meth lab in order to pay their bills), or whether the big infodump I saw a little later concerning a bunch of other horny werewolves whose names and location are all rattled off with the speed of a TV recap was stuff I needed to actually know for this particular story, or was just a fan-service cameo by the characters of one of the previous novels in the series (which, again, turned out to be the latter). That left just the current storyline itself after that was all figured out, which was not bad from an objective standpoint (that is, it's no worse than any other romance novel), but suffers from the same problem as a whole lot of Kindle Unlimited books in this genre, of simply being a cookie-cutter repeat of a thousand paranormal romance/erotica novels that have already been written; as someone who now edits many of these KU romance novels for a living, it feels sometimes that I've read a thousand of them myself, and I have to confess that it disappoints me anymore when coming across one whose every beat and every detail I can pretty much already guess in advance. That's perhaps a bit unfair, in that I'm someone in the industry and therefore spend a lot of time thinking about the tropes and traditions of the romance genre; but I would offer that the genre's biggest fans actually read way more of these books than even I do, and so are likely even bigger experts at the tropes than me, so I think it's probably ultimately fair to warn heavy fans of the genre that they're likely to experience "trope fatigue" here. That's simply a consequence of the age we live in, where these kinds of books are primarily written with keywords, marketing, and search engine optimization in mind, not in the hopes of ever writing something refreshingly new and original; and while that doesn't necessarily make the book bad, it does make it essentially pornography, by which I mean that its biggest fans will be the people who burn through an entire romance novel every 24 hours because there's a highly specific thing they're fetishistically looking for (in this case, most likely the thrill of erotic rape stories, experienced in a safe way in "fated mate" tales like this one because the rapists in question are always vampires or werewolves or space aliens who are biologically driven to do so and therefore ultimately good guys who simply can't help themselves, and will most assuredly make up for it afterwards by tenderly washing the female lead character's hair), and don't really care what the storyline actually is that delivers the fetish as long as the fetish is ultimately delivered. So in this, rest assured that the "safe rape" fantasy you're looking for is confidently delivered here, although in a story that's as easy to guess beforehand as a 16-year-old boy reading a Penthouse letter about a naughty next-door neighbor. As a romance editor, that disappoints me, but as a fan I admit that it'll do; that would usually get a score of three and a half stars from me, being rounded up to four here at the "no half stars" Goodreads. ...more |
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| 3.69
| 180
| 2020
| 2020
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it was ok
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2023 reads, #9. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the
2023 reads, #9. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the same genres. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my reviews.) It was only yesterday that I was raving about Lizzy Bequin's Their Human Vessel, an outrageous dark sci-fi tale in "fated mates" territory, or "reverse harems" or "why choose" or "imprinting" or "compelled to breed" or any of the other subgenres that basically all celebrate the more animal side of sexuality, and especially the what-if concept of human women developing legitimate estrus, which is the scientific term for "going into heat." It was while checking out Bequin's website and signing up for her newsletter that I learned that I could get a free "lead magnet" title from her within what's called the "omegaverse" subgenre of romance and women's erotica, which I've had a particular interest in since having it be the very first romance manuscript ever offered to me as a freelancer, something like nine months ago now. Part of its appeal is that there is no one uncontested understanding of what it is; but in general you can say that most people agree that such stories take place in some kind of reality or another where elaborate and complicated sexual rules exist regarding who gets to have sex with whom and under what circumstances (think Jon Norman's "The Chronicles of Gor," for example, which back in the 1970s set the model for how a lot of this stuff is thought of) and that there exists the alphas of this world (the sexually dominant ones who control all the breeding and pairing that take place), and the betas (who...um, don't). In fact, it's how the omegas fit into all of this that makes it so complicated, because sometimes the omega exists to fit traditional gender roles, and sometimes it can take on a radical queer identity and goals; sometimes it serves more a romantic purpose in a book, and sometimes more explicitly sexual. Bequin's Wounded Omega, though, gives a biological explanation for each designation -- the "betas" are the pale, zombie-like creatures that the majority of the human race turned into after an "unexplained airborne environmental event" called the Cataclysm; "alphas" are the small minority who "evolved" into better physical bodies (tougher, bigger, faster) and accompanying elevated sexual drive; and "omegas" are the 1% of women who evolved in order to breed with them, by having this ability to achieve estrus, which is treated as a sort of Star Trekian "pon farr" in that getting the urge for dick but then not getting dick can literally make a woman sick or even suffer from toxic shock in their universe. That's fine, I suppose, but when it comes to one of the main pleasures people get from this genre, of watching betas get cuckolded by their natural alpha masters, it's a whole lot less fun when the betas are chalky-pale zombies who don't even understand in the first place that only the alphas are getting all the trim, much less care. Ultimately, Bequin is just positing the same concept that drove my previous read of hers, the sci-fi Their Human Vessel, this idea that exposure to space alien DNA or spores or cum or whatever will turn humans into "the next stage of evolution," which happens to have a much more animalistic sense of sexuality and an unapologetically positive attitude towards "taking what you want." And that's perhaps a better way to see this, as a sister tale in her shared "Bequin Literary Universe" where the events and races of Their Human Vessel take place too, because it doesn't really work as an omegaverse tale as I understand the subgenre to me, but is like a smaller, tamer, less logically sound version of her exquisitely batshit previous novel about eight-foot-tall blue-skinned space aliens with literal horse-sized cocks. I have more traditional omegaverse reads coming later this winter, though, so keep your eyes out for that! ...more |
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Jan 16, 2023
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| B08BCGC2BS
| 3.70
| 1,363
| Jun 16, 2020
| Jun 16, 2020
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #8. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the
2023 reads, #8. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the same genres. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my reviews.) This is one of a handful now of books I've read in what's called the "fated mate" subgenre; that's when a paranormal creature such as a werewolf or space alien is not only attracted to our story's female lead character (or FLC), but is literally compelled biologically by something in their paranormal makeup to mate with her no matter what they rationally think of the situation, usually explained away with some vague term like "werewolf DNA" or "alien blood." In the case of the "Twilight" books that first made this trope famous (called "imprinting" in those novels), this uncontrollable compulsion to mate falls more on the emotional and romantic side of things, so that werewolves suddenly find themselves with the irresistible urge to buy their girlfriend a teddy bear or wash her hair in the bathtub; but in Lizzy Bequin's Their Human Vessel, this compulsion is much more darkly sexual in nature, a story concerning the first human woman to ever visit a planet full of male-exclusive eight-foot-tall blue-skinned devil-looking space aliens, whose compulsion to breed is so strong that even after getting one whiff of her scent from hundreds of feet away, our male lead character (MLC) immediately has a groaning flood of an orgasm that splashes right on the ground in front of him without him ever touching his penis, which should give you a good idea of what exactly we're talking about here when we talk about one of these characters being "biologically compelled to breed." (Don't worry, though -- at one point he does wash her hair in a local pond, now still making it 100% of every romance or women's erotica novel I've ever read that has featured a scene of the MLC washing the FLC's hair in a body of water in one way or another. You ladies and your obsession with having your hair washed by your boyfriend, I swear, I just don't get it.) Essentially this genre provides a cleaned-up, woman-friendly means of engaging in the very dark but surprisingly common fantasy many women have about being gangbang raped, which in fact is so common that there's at least three different subgenres within romance devoted to the subject, not just these "fated mate" stories but also "reverse harem" ones (in which the FLC is more aggressive about the subject and actually loves having all these hunky dumb men at her beck and call), as well as "why choose" stories (in which each of the men actually act like a traditional romantic partner, essentially letting the FLC have three or four or five monogamous boyfriends all at once [well, the men are all monogamous, anyway], with all the guys being remarkably cool about the fact that she has four other boyfriends, justified in a way usually baked right into the book's gimmicky subject). And I have to admit, it's an extremely clever way to tell such a story, because the female readers get to both have their cake and eat it too; for if you wrote a book about just some normal human male who suffered from uncontrollable sexual urges, and who felt compelled to sometimes grab the nearest female, hold her down, then breed with her to completion, that guy would just be some gross rapist Harvey Weinstein creep, and take it from me, ain't no woman out there in existence looking for a romance novel in which Harvey Weinstein is the MLC. By making it a special part of a paranormal character's fictional biology, though, this allows the character himself to still be the kind of boyfriend women fantasize about -- thoughtful, tender, respectful, caring -- who just happens to get overwhelmed by by the "whateverian" in his bloodstream that once every blood moon compels him to insert his horse-sized dick (they're always horse-sized dicks) into his "designated seed receptacle" (the FLC, often in some kind of collar-focused light bondage gear by now) until the deed has been finished, as the puny human mewls and squirms under his rock-hard body, both loving and protesting every moment of it. Then, back to washing her hair in the bathtub! Let's be clear, a big part of what makes Their Human Vessel so enjoyable is that it's simply a great science-fiction novel to begin with, full stop, no matter what other genre might be attached to it, with Bequin clearly having the kind of mastery over SF's tropes that comes with undoubtedly being a con-going fan herself; the universe-building here is solid, expansive, believable and clever, the dialogue Peak TV-level (or, you know, Joss Whedon-level at least), the characters complex and easy to root for. But sister, then add the bright blue horse cocks and the space alien gangbangs, and I luuuuuuuurved it, because this is exactly the kind of dark, outre, go-for-it prurience I myself like in erotic stories, as someone now in his 50s and who has been exploring sexuality in a complex and nuanced way for over 30 years now. What makes this book great is that Bequin simply doesn't hold back here, like so many women's erotica authors do when push finally comes to shove at their manuscript's most graphic moments; here, our FLC is pinned down and fucked before she can even get out a question about what's happening, much less a protest, over and over and over by multiple characters in multiple situations throughout the entire book, in an unending fashion without breaks needed since the unique DNA of the horse-dicked aliens make them ready to go again mere seconds after their previous orgasm, because of course it does, of course. And, in perhaps the most clever detail of all, part of Bequin's mythos here is that small amounts of the aliens' sperm can literally reverse aging and kill cancer in humans (the big secret behind this planet, that a British East India-type private company has enslaved the entire alien population and hooked them up to dick-milking machines, to sell the sperm as a medical pill back on Earth), but large amounts of sperm will literally start turning a human into one of the aliens themselves; so every time our short-haired, small-breasted, nerdy, reader stand-in-feeling FLC takes another massive load from the three remaining non-enslaved space aliens left on the planet, in the unending aggressive gangbangs they perpetrate on her over and over in their Na'vi-looking glowing-plant-filled underground pond cavern oases, the more those loads start changing her body to be more ready to endlessly take on these massive gangbangs over and over, as her bluish skin toughens and her sex drive goes up and she understands how it can be to deeply love three men at the same time with no guilt or shame. Or, er, three eight-foot-tall blue space aliens with horse cocks, I mean. I gotta plainly say, I loved this book, women's erotica done really right, which perfectly treads that invisible line between silly and legitimately hot. I can see that this author also has a whole series in the subgenre known as "omegaverse," which I have a strong interest in exploring (the very first romance manuscript I was ever offered as a freelancer, in fact, was an omegaverse story, which sent me down a strange Wikipedia rabbit hole a full six months ago or so, which has made me curious about the genre ever since). So I may actually take that one on next, and if it's good then go straight to the group of other omegaverse novels I recently downloaded to my Kindle, when going to a promotional website recently and downloading 30 titles all at once, split up among such subgenres as Regency, contemporary, Christian, beach, cyberpunk, "knotted" (but whew, more on that another day), cozy mystery, urban fantasy, Irish small town, mafia, and...that's it. No, wait, and Tolkien "high fantasy." That's it -- that covers the 30 romance and women's erotica titles currently on my Kindle. Like, five of those are omegaverse novels, so I may or may not hop straight to those after reading Bequin's Wounded Omega, we'll see. Meanwhile, if you're the kind of person who needs something rather intense to really "enjoy yourself" as a reader (I think you know what I mean), this'll be just your ticket, a story that needs some disbelief suspended but that by doing so can really suck you in as a good old-fashioned very dirty story. ...With, you know, blue-skinned horse dicks, buyer beware. ...more |
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Jan 15, 2023
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Jan 15, 2023
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| B09QL4DXFK
| 4.00
| 4
| unknown
| Jan 16, 2022
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liked it
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2023 reads, #5. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the
2023 reads, #5. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the same genres. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my reviews.) This is one of those "lead magnet" books I come across pretty regularly at these romance/erotica promotional websites, essentially a Penthouse letter published as a standalone Kindle book and then given out for free in return for signing up for that author's newsletter. I have nothing conceptually against publishing dirty letters as 99-cent books, and this one is written as well as any of the others, which is why I'm not giving it a bad score; but as someone who has been exploring sexuality in all its (sometimes prurient, back-alley) forms for over 30 years now, I have to admit that at this point in my life, straightforward monogamous vanilla sex scenes bore me to death, which is why I can't in good conscience give this more than 3 stars as a personal score (and this is about as boring and vanilla as erotica gets -- good-looking barista meets good-looking customer, they have sex, The End). Not a bad tradeoff for joining an author's newsletter, I nonetheless would not particularly recommend it as a standalone book you should pay money for; so if you're not reading this for free at Kindle Unlimited, then buyer beware.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 08, 2023
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Jan 08, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B08QVT4Z3K
| 3.81
| 293
| unknown
| Dec 16, 2020
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #4. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through t
2023 reads, #4. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through the Kindle Unlimited program (a relatively new feature of Amazon, in which for one flat monthly fee, members can read as many quick cheap genre novels as they can possibly get through in 30 days); and so that has me starting to heavily read in these specialized genres for the first time in my life, especially when it comes to crime, fantasy and romance books, since I've never been a natural fan of these particular genres myself in my personal life, which means I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to service my clients as well as I can. So for example, early this week I got the latest promotional email from marketing company BookFunnel.com, which a couple of my clients use, letting me know of the latest hundred or so romance books that I can now download for free through their service, in return for signing up for these authors' newsletters; and instead of ignoring it like I usually do, this time I went over and actually downloaded seven titles from the unending page of identical overly Photoshopped covers of shirtless hunky badboys, and thought I would try blazing through them as fast as possible just to get an idea of what the average KU customer goes through when hunting and pecking through these endless slush piles themselves. This is now my seventh and last book of this run (see also Victoria Lewis' Wild Nights , Ellis O. Day's The Voyeur , Pearl Tate's Mate Exposed , Cecelia Mecca's The Blacksmith , Candy Quinn's Shipwrecked Beauty , and Bella Beaumont's Can't Stop Won't Stop ), and I'm relieved to say that it's far and away the best of all seven; in fact, I can state with no hesitation that it's simply a great novel, full stop, no matter what genre you're talking about, and certainly is heads and shoulders above many of the urban fantasy novels I read last year when doing my first deep dive into that genre as well, including many books by supposed amazing writers from so-called mainstream presses (I'm looking at you, Jim freaking Butcher). One of the big reasons is that author Drusilla Swan isn't afraid to get her hands dirty here, and just gleefully throws herself into the full prurience and immense darkness that a BDSM story involving vampire doms enslaving the human race begs for. In fact, this has been one of the big surprises of this reading series so far; that despite so many of these books supposedly embracing outrageous situations and subversive sexuality, most of the authors in the romance and erotica genre then pull back at the moment they should have thrown themselves forward, promising kinky adventures but then giving us the same ol' dumb boring vanilla sex, Valentine's Day teddy bears, and boyfriends washing the main character's hair in the bathtub. (Jesus, what is it with you ladies and your unending fascination for having your boyfriend wash your hair in the bathtub?!) Swan instead gives us the full monty her premise calls for, throwing us on page one into a filth-covered underground prison where kidnapped willowy young women are kept in deplorable conditions, for the purpose of being sold to vampires so they can be fucked to death and then bled for that night's dinner. Yeah, Swan ain't messing around, so that makes it all the more interesting when our reader stand-in hero Amanda (kinda mousy, kinda nerdy) is purchased by the head of one of the two major vampire "families" now running the planet (due to a magical orb the vampires acquired that completely blocks out the sun 24/7, allowing them to very easily overwhelm and then conquer the global human race), then is treated with the kind of "loving firm hand" that's so prevalent in BDSM romance novels, as her stoically gorgeous, emotionally stern master Alex slowly enfolds her into his life at the Paris castle he has taken over as his private home and family headquarters, where she learns that there's actually a lot more infighting, politics and drama among the vampires than the puny conquered humans have even guessed at (to say nothing of the rebel humans who have learned how to wield magic and act as a sort of terrorist antagonist to the vampires, eventually revealed as the actual villains because they have murderous contempt for the "weak, useless" other humans who haven't bothered to fight back). That gets us into the other major thing that makes this book stand so much taller than the others I've read, which is that Swan goes to the trouble of actually building out a complex and compelling universe for her characters to inhabit, a deep and rich mythos involving underground demons in eastern Europe, thousands of years of vampire history, and other details that wouldn't be out of place at your local "Coniconicon" fantasy convention taking place each summer. The simple fact is that Swan's writing chops are high here, so much so that she could easily be a staff writer for a Peak TV kind of series like Buffy or X-Files; and that does nothing but highlight even more that so many of these other romance and erotica novels you find at these promotional websites are just real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, churned out by the truckload and all of it just barely of high enough quality to justify its existence as a free read at Kindle Unlimited. I was relieved and gratified to come across a romance novelist who actually cares more about her audience than that, and who is committed to giving them the same kind of high-quality reading experience one might get with any mainstream book you'd find at a Barnes & Noble; and I have to confess that Swan now becomes the first romance author in history that I've actually given money to, so that I can read the further adventures of our plucky hero Amanda and see whether things work out for the seductively dark Diamantis family or not. That now brings an end to my original run of seven novels; but I have to admit, I found the whole experience so fascinating, I went back to one of these promotional websites and downloaded an entire 30 more books, which I'll be continuing to make my way through this winter and spring in between my more usual titles. (Yes, friends, I know many of you have been getting sick of my detour into Romance Land this month; don't worry, Don Delillo's White Noise is coming next!) Please check out the "romance" tag at the top of this review to check out all the romance novels I end up reviewing; but for now, absolutely stop everything and go pick up a copy of this, a real highlight of the romance genre that will scratch every itch a paranormal or BDSM fan will have. ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Jan 06, 2023
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Jan 06, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B09HPVDPQM
| 1.00
| 1
| unknown
| Oct 02, 2021
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did not like it
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2023 reads, #3. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through t
2023 reads, #3. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through the Kindle Unlimited program (a relatively new feature of Amazon, in which for one flat monthly fee, members can read as many quick cheap genre novels as they can possibly get through in 30 days); and so that has me starting to heavily read in these specialized genres for the first time in my life, especially when it comes to crime, fantasy and romance books, since I've never been a natural fan of these particular genres myself in my personal life, which means I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to service my clients as well as I can. So for example, early this week I got the latest promotional email from marketing company BookFunnel.com, which a couple of my clients use, letting me know of the latest hundred or so romance books that I can now download for free through their service, in return for signing up for these authors' newsletters; and instead of ignoring it like I usually do, this time I went over and actually downloaded seven titles from the unending page of identical overly Photoshopped covers of shirtless hunky badboys, and thought I would try blazing through them as fast as possible just to get an idea of what the average KU customer goes through when hunting and pecking through these endless slush piles themselves. This is now my sixth book of the run (see also Ellis O. Day's The Voyeur , Pearl Tate's Mate Exposed , Cecelia Mecca's The Blacksmith , Candy Quinn's Shipwrecked Beauty , and Bella Beaumont's Can't Stop Won't Stop ), but unfortunately is also the first in the series to be so subpar as to not even be worth your time downloading; not only is it the length of a Penthouse letter being marketed as a full-length book, but it's pretty clear that English is the second language of author Victoria Lewis, leading to one of those stilted and odd-sounding manuscripts that make you stop and think once every few pages, "...I'm sorry, what was that?" (Here's a sample paragraph, to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, complete with all grammar and punctuation errors: "Is her new wed hubby sure about this? Isn't JC forgetting the potential consequences of these kind of actions? Would they take the risk in sake of his lust? What would people think about her virtue as a christian wife, back in their hometown? 'Don't worry, we are far away from home. No one will know anything.' JC said, calming and appeasing Dora's anxiety.") To be honest, I thought that most of the free romance books I would find through these kinds of promotions would be exactly like this one, essentially unreadable garbage being pumped out by the truckload, because so many self-publishing authors have been promised that romance fans are essentially like heroin addicts, and that you can put any half-baked crap in front of them and they'll gobble it up like the junkies they are. Actual romance fans know this isn't true -- any fan of books, no matter what the genre, wants the books they read to have at least a minimum amount of quality to them, even if they're willing to cut books in their favorite genre a break that non-fans of that genre wouldn't -- and I have to say, I sympathize with romance fans when coming across dreck like this, time-wasting nonsense that litter the back pages of Kindle Unlimited like so much untouchable garbage. That gets this book a hard pass from me, but hopefully we'll be ending things on a better note tomorrow, with Drusilla Swan's alpha-male paranormal romance thriller Sold to the Master Vampire. See you again then! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 03, 2023
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Jan 03, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1942706219
| B077CPG5NT
| 3.63
| 808
| Nov 11, 2017
| Nov 11, 2017
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it was ok
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2023 read, #2. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through th
2023 read, #2. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through the Kindle Unlimited program (a relatively new feature of Amazon, in which for one flat monthly fee, members can read as many quick cheap genre novels as they can possibly get through in 30 days); and so that has me starting to heavily read in these specialized genres for the first time in my life, especially when it comes to crime, fantasy and romance books, since I've never been a natural fan of these particular genres myself in my personal life, which means I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to service my clients as well as I can. So for example, early this week I got the latest promotional email from marketing company BookFunnel.com, which a couple of my clients use, letting me know of the latest hundred or so romance books that I can now download for free through their service, in return for signing up for these authors' newsletters; and instead of ignoring it like I usually do, this time I went over and actually downloaded seven titles from the unending page of identical overly Photoshopped covers of shirtless hunky badboys, and thought I would try blazing through them as fast as possible just to get an idea of what the average KU customer goes through when hunting and pecking through these endless slush piles themselves. This is now my fifth book of the run (see also Pearl Tate's Mate Exposed , Cecelia Mecca's The Blacksmith , Candy Quinn's Shipwrecked Beauty , and Bella Beaumont's Can't Stop Won't Stop ), and another one that turns out to be a lot more erotica than romance, based around the interesting franchise-friendly premise of three former Army buddies who decide to open a sex club after they get out of the military, then as their first nonsexual hire bring on their dead comrade's now adult and hot little sister, who all three immediately form a fascination for (two paternal, one sexual). Unfortunately, though, this book mostly plays out exactly like I was worried these books were going to when I first decided to take on this project -- that is, with a plot that's almost non-existent, within a setting that's so sketchily drawn that it feels like little more than a generic office but with naked people, featuring confusing characters who all vaguely look and sound alike (I found it almost impossible to keep the names of the three bros straight in my head), a forced sense of conflict that amounts sometimes to little more than people standing around screaming at each other, and sex scenes that feel simultaneously too tame and too brash, like a 14-year-old who's never had sex trying to describe what he imagines it must be like. Also, I wasn't much of a fan of the inherent sloppy sexism in the three guys -- how they find it no problem to treat most women like inanimate objects, except if it's the sister of someone they actually know, at which point all three get weirded out about the very idea of her possessing a sense of sexuality. But as I've mentioned in numerous other reviews now, one of the big surprises for me in this reading project is that all of these novels so far, without a single exception, have gleefully embraced the kind of puerile, horrifying misogyny that movements like #MeToo are actively fighting against, making it the height of irony for me that these exact kinds of stories designed to fulfill men's most sexist fantasies are read (and apparently loved) almost exclusively by women. All of that combined gets the book a disappointing 2 stars from me, but hopefully we'll be on to bigger and better things tomorrow when I finally take on my first Sexy Vampire story, such a long staple of romance that it can be traced all the way back to the Victorian Age when romance novels were invented in the first place. I'll see you here again soon for that! ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jan 02, 2023
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Jan 02, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B0B5BDNL98
| 4.12
| 336
| unknown
| Jun 27, 2022
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it was ok
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2023 reads, #1. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through t
2023 reads, #1. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through the Kindle Unlimited program (a relatively new feature of Amazon, in which for one flat monthly fee, members can read as many quick cheap genre novels as they can possibly get through in 30 days); and so that has me starting to heavily read in these specialized genres for the first time in my life, especially when it comes to crime, fantasy and romance books, since I've never been a natural fan of these particular genres myself in my personal life, which means I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to service my clients as well as I can. So for example, early this week I got the latest promotional email from marketing company BookFunnel.com, which a couple of my clients use, letting me know of the latest hundred or so romance books that I can now download for free through their service, in return for signing up for these authors' newsletters; and instead of ignoring it like I usually do, this time I went over and actually downloaded seven titles from the unending page of identical overly Photoshopped covers of shirtless hunky badboys, and thought I would try blazing through them as fast as possible just to get an idea of what the average KU customer goes through when hunting and pecking through these endless slush piles themselves. This is now my fourth book of the run (see also Cecelia Mecca's The Blacksmith , Candy Quinn's Shipwrecked Beauty , and Bella Beaumont's Can't Stop Won't Stop ), and the first to cover the well-known romance trope known as "fated mates," which is when some sort of magical or other paranormal contrivance brings our two romantic leads together in a way so that no free will or rational choice is involved, but rather that the paranormal contrivance is literally forcing the two to be the kinds of soulmates the universe is demanding of them no matter what the individuals themselves think of it. Probably the most well-known example is the phenomenon of "imprinting" among werewolves in the "Twilight" books (or at least this is what Google is telling me -- I've never read the books myself), which as far as I can tell is a kind of play on animals going into heat, but in the case of werewolves involves not only an irresistible compulsion to have sex with the woman in question but also to mate with her for life, to protect her and take care of her and wash her hair in the bathtub and all the other sometimes eyerolling kinds of details that are found in romance novels. And we've got a similar thing going on here in Mate Exposed, except this time the werewolves are actually eight-foot-tall blue-skinned space aliens, and the "imprinting" is just one aspect of a whole formal mating ritual they have back on their home planet, which our female hero, grade school teacher Victoria, learns all about when one of them saves her from a gang-rape among the tattered survivors of an apocalyptic event on Earth that is rapidly turning its victims into a planet full of flesh-eating zombies, a side effect of an interstellar war going on between our hunky Ajnarans and one of their alien rivals. That's a whole lot to cram into a small romance novella being used as a free magnet for getting people to sign up for a newsletter, and a big part of the problem here is that author Pearl Tate is simply not up to the task, not giving any of these elements enough time and space to be developed on their own, leaving us with lots of tantalizing ideas that we can only examine briefly in the rearview mirror as we rush our way to the next plot point. Plus, I don't know if this is specifically because I'm a guy or if this is a universal problem, but I simply had a hard time connecting together the elements I expect from a romance novel with the strange, outre tale being told here about hulking monstrous space aliens and what feels to me like a thinly veiled message about how great sex slavery is, and how a lot of our problems in our modern world would easily be solved if we simply got rid of the idea of women having free will, and instead let the big strong men just fight it out over who's going to own any particular "seed receptacle" among the women-folk. This might be a gender bias of mine, in that I simply can't understand the nearly universal appeal I've found so far in the romance genre of men "owning" women and women getting just unbelievably turned on by such ownership (an aspect that's shown up now in every single romance novel I've ever read, no matter what its genre or tropes), and the inherent unsolvable contradiction this creates with our modern notion of female equality and empowerment. (Jesus, no wonder dating in your twenties is so fucking difficult.) Or, you know, it might be simply because this particular book isn't very good, which I half-suspect is the case since all the other fundamentals of storytelling are only being accomplished in a mediocre fashion here too. Whatever the case, more research is warranted, so I'll be exploring this "fated mate" subgenre more within romance in the coming months, to see if I can get a better handle on the subject and why it's apparently addictive like catnip to the women who happen to like this subgenre. For now, though, I recommend skipping this particular title, and holding out for a better fated mate than an eight-foot-tall blue-skinned alien who would gladly give it all up to wash his human girlfriend's hair in the bathtub. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 2023
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Jan 01, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B07V7HVND4
| 4.17
| 965
| Jul 23, 2019
| Jul 23, 2019
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it was amazing
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2022 reads, #61. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through
2022 reads, #61. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through the Kindle Unlimited program (a relatively new feature of Amazon, in which for one flat monthly fee, members can read as many quick cheap genre novels as they can possibly get through in 30 days); and so that has me starting to heavily read in these specialized genres for the first time in my life, especially when it comes to crime, fantasy and romance books, since I've never been a natural fan of these particular genres myself in my personal life, which means I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to service my clients as well as I can. So for example, early this week I got the latest promotional email from marketing company BookFunnel.com, which a couple of my clients use, letting me know of the latest hundred or so romance books that I can now download for free through their service, in return for signing up for these authors' newsletters; and instead of ignoring it like I usually do, this time I went over and actually downloaded seven titles from the unending page of identical overly Photoshopped covers of shirtless hunky badboys, and thought I would try blazing through them one a day this week just to get an idea of what the average KU customer goes through when hunting and pecking through these endless slush piles themselves. This is now my third book of the run (see also Candy Quinn's Shipwrecked Beauty and Bella Beaumont's Can't Stop Won't Stop ), and one that slowed down my streak of a book per day by a few extra days, because this turned out to be the first full-length actual three-act book I've read through this promotion so far, a telling sign of its higher quality in general. And indeed, this is a real textbook example of how to get a quick-reading Kindle Unlimited romance novel right, because it hits all the right tropes at all the right moments but still keeps the fundamentals of genre storytelling at a high level. Set in the Evil King John period of 1200s England (the same setting as the Robin Hood stories), it's the story of a France-loving blacksmith who's secretly also a knight in a Templar-type organization devoted to taking down John from the inside; at his next boss's castle, where he specifically inserted himself in order to gauge the earl's chances of supporting a rebellion, he doesn't expect to fall in love with the earl's beautiful, headstrong, curiously modern and progressive daughter (ah, but who ever does?). The thing that really strikes me here, which I've noticed before and have recently added to the essay of romance advice I'm putting together for an upcoming issue of my free editing newsletter, is how the best romance novels present a male romantic lead who's not this type of guy or that type of guy, but is instead every type of guy for every occasion, with directly competing aspects of his personality that manifest themselves at the exact most perfect time for the female romantic lead to be impressed, attracted or aroused by (depending on the situation), almost as if he can somehow magically read her mind. While this infuriates me as an actual guy who actually exists in the actual world (and goes a long way towards explaining why so many of my exes in my early twenties acted the way they did, as if offended that I couldn't read their minds), I have to admit that this is really effective in a romance novel designed for a fanbase of 95% women, and when done right like is the case here makes it easy to see why fans of the genre can get so sucked in so thoroughly. That makes our hunky hero Lance (or "Sir Lance" if you're Frenchy) really compelling, because he can be a strict follower of traditional gender roles one moment and suddenly a radically progressive supporter of modern women's rights the next, aggressive and territorial about love one moment and suddenly reticent and intimate the next. When you combine this, then, with a main female lead who's deliberately shown as kind of a smart nerd, but not afraid of a little hard work (it's established in the backstory that the earl's daughter, Idalia, was already a fan of visiting the smithing forge even during the last blacksmith's time, which gives her a convenient excuse for she and Lance to spend time together), this provides a really engaging couple to put into a will-they-won't-they situation, fraught with all the subsumed eroticism that comes with the High-Chivalry period of the Medieval years. What seals it all up, though, is author Cecelia Mecca's devotion to period accuracy, authentic-sounding dialogue, and strange and wonderfully odd details to add the whole thing a little color; witness for example the lovingly convoluted story that goes into explaining why their castle has this one lone interior abandoned tower not connected to anything else, which Idalia has used since childhood as her secret little book-reading nerd getaway spot, which adds this nicely concrete visual image that helps flesh out this northern British castle and regional market location where our story takes place. It's nothing spectacular, mind you, but the writing's every bit as good as a random episode of a Medieval-style show on cable TV, whether that's House of Dragons or The Rings of Power, The Wheel of Time, etc. In fact, that's probably a good litmus test -- if you can write a spec script for your favorite genre television show that sounds like an actual episode of that show, you're skilled enough to churn out quick but above-average novels in that genre for Kindle Unlimited fans. Plus, I have to admit, it's the only romance novel I've ever read in my life so far that made me legitimately interested in reading the rest of the books in the series; and that's a big leap forward for someone who not even ten years ago was still actively making fun of this genre, like a large portion of America continues to do to this day. Coming next, Pearl Tate's sci-fi "fated mates" tale Mate Exposed, so join me again in a few days for that; but in the meanwhile, I give The Blacksmith a ringing endorsement, a solid example of a High Medieval tale (basically Tolkien fantasy without the dragons or hobbits) that will scratch all the itches of the usual romance fan. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 28, 2022
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Dec 28, 2022
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| B07MQJDQ3H
| 3.72
| 32
| unknown
| Jan 10, 2019
|
really liked it
|
2022 reads, #60. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through
2022 reads, #60. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through the Kindle Unlimited program (a relatively new feature of Amazon, in which for one flat monthly fee, members can read as many quick cheap genre novels as they can possibly get through in 30 days); and so that has me starting to heavily read in these specialized genres for the first time in my life, especially when it comes to crime, fantasy and romance books, since I've never been a natural fan of these particular genres myself in my personal life, which means I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to service my clients as well as I can. So for example, early this week I got the latest promotional email from marketing company BookFunnel.com, which a couple of my clients use, letting me know of the latest hundred or so romance books that I can now download for free through their service, in return for signing up for these authors' newsletters; and instead of ignoring it like I usually do, this time I went over and actually downloaded seven titles from the unending page of identical overly Photoshopped covers of shirtless hunky badboys, and thought I would try blazing through them one a day this week just to get an idea of what the average KU customer goes through when hunting and pecking through these endless slush piles themselves. Today's book is my second of the week, after Monday's Can't Stop Won't Stop by Bella Beaumont, and I'm glad to say that this title has the more delightfully batshit kind of storyline I expect from these over-the-top melodramas, one of the main pleasures for me of this genre. It's about a mid-tier model who's hoping to break into Hollywood, who accepts an invitation from a Harvey Weinstein-type to go on a pleasure cruise on his luxury yacht, with the unspoken understanding that she's essentially to be his prostitute for a week in return for a part in his latest movie. But right as the book begins, the yacht experiences a shipwreck, and she along with the rest of the boat's passengers end up on a nearby deserted tropical island. It's there where her life is rescued by one of the yacht's crewmen, a barely literate caveman-type (six-foot-six, pure muscle, dressed only in a ripped pair of boxer shorts that amply show off his literal horse-sized dick), who informs her that she can stay with him while he exercises his well-honed survivalist skills if she wants, but that in return he expects to get to rape her whenever he feels like it, and if she doesn't like it she can take her chances with Weinstein and the other cucks down at the beach. Guess which option she chooses?! Unlike yesterday's book, this one hits a lot more of the kinds of beats I expect from the romance genre (the initial conflict, the eventual softening of that conflict, the inherent hypocrisy of a misogynistic he-man who nonetheless is a sensitive protector of the woman he owns [oh, and lots of talk about how the lead male character "owns" the lead female character, an aspect of romance writing I see over and over in these books]); and like a lot of these kinds of books, there's one very specific sexual fetish on display here (in this case, the idea of the woman getting unbelievably turned on by the idea of becoming accidentally pregnant because of deliberate unprotected sex, a fetish I would've never expected women to have but that shows up over and over in these kinds of books), which is giving me a growing understanding that all modern romance books now concentrate on one highly specific issue or another of this type, so that they can officially distinguish themselves from the other six kajillion romance ebooks now available through Kindle Unlimited (and with another two bazillion new ones added every single week). Of course, this also suffers from the same problems as a lot of these quick cheap genre exercises, chief of which is author Candy Quinn clearly deciding to use Grammarly to edit her book instead of a human. How can you tell? Well, for one, although there isn't a single misspelled word in the entire book, there are a number of places where a correctly spelled word is used incorrectly ("supple" when it should've been "supply," "breath" when it should've been "breathe"); and for another, when a book looks perfect from a spelling and punctuation aspect, but is filled with clunky sentences that aren't worded correctly, and paragraphs that cut off in the middle when they should've been combined, that's the sign that a computer program has been at work and not a human being with a human brain and human comprehension skills. Also, this book suffers the same problem as yesterday's title of the sex scenes being sometimes horrifically hostile to women and written at the level of a horny 14-year-old boy, endless references to "slits" and "sluts" and "I'm gonna pound you into a crater" and whatnot. Ideologically this is fine -- women should be allowed to enjoy self-hating sexist trash if they want, although I admit as a guy that it surprises me -- but at least write the scenes in a way so that they actually turn readers on, unlike these last two books that have all the eroticism of a 21st-century professional porn shoot, with all the humiliation and physical abuse and the endless exhortations to "uhhhh, take it, bitch!" you would expect from such a comparison. (Also, if we're going to get picky, there's a lot to be desired in this book's plot logic, in which it's important for the climax that the Weinstein character still be alive and on the same island as them, but the only way to pull it off is to propose that our two protagonists have been living completely isolated from the rest of the passengers up in the deep jungle by themselves for weeks with no contact, which strains credulity and not in the fun outrageous way that romance novels should. But that's neither here nor there, I suppose.) All this would normally get 3 and a half stars from me, which I'm rounding up here at the "no half stars" Goodreads, since I suspect that a lot of the other romance books I'll be reading this week will actually be a lot worse than this one. An eye-opening experience, this is so far about as good as the romance genre has gotten in my reading, which you should not mistake as a compliment but rather picture me saying while sighing and rolling my eyes. Tomorrow it's on to Cecelia Mecca's The Blacksmith, promising a Medieval theme but still with the same vaguely Proud Boys-looking shirtless hunky fascist on the overly Photoshopped front cover. I hope you'll have a chance to join me again for that! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 20, 2022
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Dec 20, 2022
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| B07YB6QV3W
| 2.74
| 68
| unknown
| Sep 23, 2019
|
liked it
|
2022 reads, #59. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through
2022 reads, #59. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through the Kindle Unlimited program (a relatively new feature of Amazon, in which for one flat monthly fee, members can read as many quick cheap genre novels as they can possibly get through in 30 days); and so that has me starting to heavily read in these specialized genres for the first time in my life, especially when it comes to crime, fantasy and romance books, since I've never been a natural fan of these particular genres myself in my personal life, which means I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to service my clients as well as I can. So for example, early this week I got the latest promotional email from marketing company BookFunnel.com, which a couple of my clients use, letting me know of the latest hundred or so romance books that I can now download for free through their service, in return for signing up for these authors' newsletters; and instead of ignoring it like I usually do, this time I went over and actually downloaded seven titles from the unending page of identical overly Photoshopped covers of shirtless hunky badboys, and thought I would try blazing through them one a day this week just to get an idea of what the average KU customer goes through when hunting and pecking through these endless slush piles themselves. I'm taking them on alphabetically, which means first on the list this week was Bella Beaumont's Can't Stop Won't Stop, which despite its somewhat outlier status (it's not actually a romance novel but instead straight-up erotica) is still pretty much exactly what I was expecting from cheap quick genre publishing -- not very lengthy (basically the size of a long short story), with no character development to speak of, dialogue that can charitably only be called "pedestrian," a fairly non-existent plot (just one sex scene and a bit of expository information leading up to it), with a title and cover art that has nothing to do with the story itself, but was obviously picked for SEO purposes (it's ostensibly about a middle-aged mom who's an unrepentant sexual voyeur, including spying on her teenaged children's dalliances with their high-school sweethearts, but then the storyline itself has not even the slightest thing at all to do with the mom, instead being an overly detailed description of her son's vanilla sex session with his latest girlfriend, and with not even a single shirtless MILF in sight like the cover promises), and with the kind of flawless spelling but clunky sentence structure that belies that the manuscript was run through Grammarly but never touched by a human editor. In fact, the one and only surprise in this entire book is how aggressively hostile and male-sounding the erotic parts sound, with endless references to (direct quotes here) "raw-dogging" and "breaking open some poor slut's tight pussy" and "skullfucking" a girl while the guy's "sweaty enormous nutsack" bounces against her face. I'm a guy and even I don't get turned on by language like this, so it surprised me that a book apparently written by a woman and designed for a female-exclusive audience would be written in the frown-inducing vernacular of a high-fiving frat bro. ("Whoo! Nutsack! WHOOOO!!!!!") That at least has me curious now about whether this was a strange exception to the usual rule about female erotica, or if us guys simply aren't aware of the secret misogyny that runs rampant in those shirtless-hunk books our girlfriends and wives are thrillingly reading behind our backs, and that we would normally not touch with a ten-foot pole. I'll be reading more to see if this is indeed the case; but for now, this book gets a nice solid 3-star "meh" from me, the literary equivalent of the flavorless iceberg lettuce in your salad that you mindlessly consume in your office's sad little break room in order to fill up your stomach with something. It should be downloaded from Kindle Unlimited with this warning in mind. Next up, Candy Quinn's Shipwrecked Beauty, in which a supermodel crashes on a deserted island and is forced to entertain the whims of a horny Robinson Crusoe. Join me here tomorrow for that! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Dec 19, 2022
|
Dec 19, 2022
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0962344729
| 9780962344725
| 0962344729
| 4.16
| 3,520
| 1977
| Jan 01, 1993
|
it was amazing
|
(2021 reads, #104.)
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0802137830
| 9780802137838
| 0802137830
| 3.85
| 895
| Mar 01, 2000
| Mar 30, 2001
|
did not like it
|
[UPDATE: All five of my "George Miles" reviews, including this one, are now collected and available as a standalone book at Amazon!] 2021 reads, #47. T [UPDATE: All five of my "George Miles" reviews, including this one, are now collected and available as a standalone book at Amazon!] 2021 reads, #47. This is volume #5 of my five-book read this month of the classic LGBTQ "George Miles" cycle by Dennis Cooper, one of the heralded "New Transgressive" authors of early Generation X that also included Poppy Z. Brite, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and others (but for a lot more details, see my review of book #1 in the series, 1989's Closer; book #2, 1991's Frisk; book #3, 1994's Try; and book #4, 1997's Guide). Here as we finally finish out the series, it's worth asking why the entire cycle is titled after some unknown person named George Miles in the first place, given that he never actually appears as a character in any of the books, and that all five of the volumes seem to be about entirely different sets of people living entirely different sets of lives that never overlap? The answer, as Cooper divulged at the end of the previous novel, and has since elaborated on in numerous interviews, is that Miles was actually a very real person from his actual true life, a 13-year-old he knew back when he was 17 who he developed a debilitating yet chaste crush on, not returned by George although apparently they did have some sort of weird awkward tryst once when both of them were almost thirty years old, a decade later. Cooper's young feelings for Miles were intense and scary to him, influenced by being exposed at an early age to violent pornography, which he found himself responding to physically even though emotionally and morally he was repulsed by it (apparently having a recurring fantasy that we see pop up in these books again and again as well, that George was so impossibly and angelically beautiful that the only way Cooper could respond was with this deep desire to physically destroy him, as a way of internalizing this beauty into himself in much the same way Jeffrey Dahmer did); and apparently all five of these novels were attempts by Cooper to work out these feelings and try to come to some sort of resolution about them, which years later he admitted in further interviews that he simply failed at, now in his sixties still as confused about these intense feelings as he was way back when he was 17. That's all fine and good, and in the first four novels of the cycle, they at least feel somewhat connected, in that all of them take place in the vacuous suburbs of Los Angeles, and all of the characters are described as looking virtually identical (think Keanu Reeves circa mid-1980s, or the bassist from Blur circa mid-1990s, two specific references that Cooper himself makes in the novels), and all of their drugs of choice vary within the limited range of marijuana, downers and heroin, and all of them are vaguely into the same '90s Generation X pop-culture (zines, Husker Du, Guided By Voices, outre artists like Joel-Peter Witkin, etc.), and all of the books are written in a fairly straightforward style, some clearer than others but all of them at least traditional narratives that take us from point A to B and then C. So that makes it all the more baffling, then, that to close out the series on the cusp of the 21st century, Cooper takes this huge left turn into uncharted territory, and sets this last novel among rednecks in the Deep South who all take crystal meth and fashion themselves as Satanists. And not only that, but now the narrative isn't straightforward at all, but rather deliberately artsy and super-pretentious, a sort of unsatisfying blend of bad poetry and bad prose that makes these circular loops in logic and plot, featuring literally unreadable tripe on every other page like abstract poetry presented as timecoded transcripts of an insane person talking to themselves, and sometimes pages and pages and pages of pure looping dialogue in the spirit of something like Waiting for Godot, to say nothing of the sections whose margins have been squished so far in that the text now only exists as this barely readable one-inch ribbon right down the center of the otherwise blank page. To be precise, it doesn't feel like a George Miles novel at all, but that Cooper just happened to be halfway through a brand-new, much more experimental book, then suddenly decided one day that he just wanted to be done with the subject of George Miles altogether for good, and that the turn of the millennium seemed like as symbolically good a time as any to do so, so he just arbitrarily declared this "the last George Miles novel" then ran off to cash his advance from Grove Press before the check bounced. It's important to remember, though, that Cooper was actually a widely published poet for an entire decade before he ever published prose for the first time; and not just a poet, but a poet who loved the abstract, arty nature of the avant-garde, writing in his young years for such publications as Artforum, curating evenings of performance art in the hippie California town of Venice, and once devoting an entire issue of a self-published magazine to the work of Arthur Rimbaud. And it's also important to remember that Cooper was almost 50 when he finally published this last book in the cycle, now a pop-culture figure himself whose previous two commercial hits had made him a mainstay among hipsters at SPIN magazine and MTV, and as far as I can tell was feeling quite ambivalent at that point about the brain-dead morons who kept snapping their fingers and demanding more of the kiddie-porn snuff-film dog-and-pony show that he had become somewhat cartoonishly known for by then. (Clap clap! "Make with the Tarantino already, Cooper!" Clap clap!) As someone who's in my early fifties right now myself, and who has been similarly going through a period of weary ambivalence about the monetization of creativity, I can attest how tempting it is at this particular age to really take a step back and reconnect with the pretentious yet earnest teenaged artist you once were, public reaction be damned and public paychecks be damned; so I think it's entirely fair to assume that a certain amount of that was going on with Cooper at this point in his life too, and that the switch into much more abstract and challenging writing here can be largely attributed to that, especially given the fact that we talked about last time, about how nearly all the New Transgressive authors during this time period went through spiritual crises as they approached the new millennium and the end of their cartoon sex-and-violence popularity, and how all of them came out the other side of 9/11 suddenly talking about Jesus and Buddha and Hillary Clinton needing a village, and so forth and so on. Still, though, that doesn't necessarily make a novel good; and let's be honest, this is a real stinker, really only the size of a short story once you remove all the masturbatory abstract poetry that Cooper has the gall to expect you to read like it's a three-act plot. It's very much a case of this series ending with a whimper instead of a bang; and it's telling, I think, that Cooper has only published four more traditional novels in the 21 years since, now spending the vast majority of his time and energy on avant-garde plays, experimental fiction projects, and collaborations with various musicians and filmmakers, including his own imprint through the beloved Akashic Books that has helped introduce an entire new generation of transgressive authors to a general audience. You can very much see the start of Cooper running out of enthusiasm for traditional novels here in this book; and to be honest, I don't really think it should be required reading at all for those who are interested in the first four novels in the George Miles series, especially since he so nicely wraps up the mystery of who Miles is at the very end of the previous book, which feels much more like a natural bookend to this series than this frustrating mess of a fifth volume. Although I'm glad I went to the trouble of finally reading all these books for the first time in my life, after him being such an oft-referenced pop-culture figure in my own Generation X '90s youth, I can pretty honestly say that I'll never pick up a Dennis Cooper book again; an interesting journey that taught me a lot about the rise and fall of transgressive literature at the bizarre, chaotic end of the Postmodernist era, but a series of novels that ultimately I just did not enjoy as simple reading experiences in any way whatsoever. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
|
Jul 18, 2021
|
Jul 18, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0802135803
| 9780802135803
| 0802135803
| 4.02
| 971
| May 1997
| Aug 06, 1998
|
liked it
|
[UPDATE: All five of my "George Miles" reviews, including this one, are now collected and available as a standalone book at Amazon!] 2021 reads, #46. T [UPDATE: All five of my "George Miles" reviews, including this one, are now collected and available as a standalone book at Amazon!] 2021 reads, #46. This is volume #4 of my five-book read this month of the classic LGBTQ "George Miles" cycle by Dennis Cooper, one of the heralded "New Transgressive" authors of early Generation X that also included Poppy Z. Brite, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and others (but for a lot more details, see my review of book #1 in the series, 1989's Closer; book #2, 1991's Frisk; and book #3, 1994's Try). This turns out to be a particularly interesting one as well, because Cooper decides to go in an entirely different direction here, beyond the arty disaffected numbed youth of the first two books and the simplistic torture porn of the third, which had been done in an attempt to capture a larger audience and more mainstream media attention right at the moment Corporate America in general started embracing Generation X in their usual attempt to make a buck off of the latest generation of twentysomethings. (Spoiler alert: it never really worked; so the moment the generation after them, the more earnest and more naive Millennials, started having discretionary income for the first time, Corporate America instantly switched over to pleasing them, because the vacuous boy bands and insipid reality shows that are now a permanent part of our culture worked a lot better on them than they did the cynical, skeptical, fun-hating Generation X.) In Guide, we follow two very simplistic storylines, a more straightforwardly plotted book than any of the three before them. In one thread, we're having a direct conversation with a middle-aged writer named Dennis, who we've learned has become famous for writing a series of edgy novels in which disaffected numbed youth constantly do drugs and have unsatisfying sex in a failed attempt to experience any kind of real emotions in their lives, and who has recently been hired by SPIN magazine to write a nonfiction article about one such group of disaffected youth in the culturally empty suburbs of Los Angeles; while the other thread follows the adventures of these actual youths that "Dennis" has been hired by SPIN to follow, as they emptily follow a transgressive script so Cooperian in nature that it might as well be a kabuki stage play we're watching. So in this, then, you can very, very easily see both Dennis the novelist and Dennis the novelist-character almost instantly lose his interest in the actual young people he's been hired to write about, to instead spend more and more time relating a bizarre incident from his own '70s youth in which he believes he may or may not have actually met God after ingesting 90 tabs of acid over the course of 30 days during an extended family vacation to Hawaii, and who becomes more and more interested in exploring this mystical vision and parsing out what it means about faith, about the supernatural, and about whether there really is a ghostly little creature inside all of us, who up to now he and his friends had been essentially keeping unconscious through their rampant drug use and unceasing cruel sex acts. So in other words, a lot of this book reads like, "Yeah yeah yeah, kiddie porn, snuff films, heroin addicts, whatever, you sheep. But have I told you about the Good News of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior yet? And that you may or may not be able to get directly in touch with Him through the chaos magick rituals of Peter J. Carroll?" This should actually come as no surprise; for as I've mentioned in all three of my Miles reviews before this one, in hindsight we now know that this is what happened to a whole lot of these edgy Generation X writers (and just Generation X in general), as the early '90s turned into the late '90s, and the need to write ever more outrageous storylines to justify their fame as transgressive authors eventually collapsed into a mess of B-grade horror tropes about serial killers and cannibals and morally troubled vampires -- that they emerged on the other side with this newfound interest in connecting with something mystical and that was bigger than themselves, whether that manifested as Jesus, Buddha, Allah or Oprah (that last reference of which I don't mean as a joke; these are precisely the years that the New Age movement first went mainstream and took over the middle-class suburbs), which then just increased tenfold in intensity once the 21st century greeted us with the events of 9/11 and the permanent destruction of the then 35-year-old Postmodernist art movement (that is, if like me you define the beginning of Postmodernism to coincide with Kennedy's assassination, although I acknowledge that there's some debate about this). I've been musing throughout this entire series about whether Cooper would ever reach this "I saw the light" moment in his own work; and sure enough, I turned out to be right. It's also telling, I think, that after complaining in my review of the previous novel, Try, about how some of his teenage characters were now starting to suffer from Clueless Middle-Aged Writer Syndrome -- with one in particular who, despite the story taking place in 1994, might as well have been depicted as mindlessly staring at his iPhone and constantly muttering "whateeeeever" (the perpetual siren song of the clueless middle-aged writer attempting to flesh out teenage characters, who they no longer can relate to but only view with a mixture of contempt and confusion) -- here in the 1997 Guide this is exactly what we see many of these characters precisely and literally do and say, with Cooper in fact making a running joke throughout the manuscript about how often words fail these illiterate little brats so that they're forced to default back to the mindless "whatever" to express all their emotions. This is always a danger for authors who first got famous for being unusually insightful about the inner thoughts of teens, like the reputation Cooper has had for nearly his entire career; that as they first grow into the age group of parents and then into the lower boundary of grandparent age (Cooper was 45 when this book was published), they often simply lose the ability to write teenage characters in the probing, true-to-life way that made them famous to begin with, a problem you can very clearly see here as well. Whateeeeever! I mean, let's make no mistake, there's just as much filth here as in all the other books, set in a world where every person who even exists is one of an infinite variety of The Ideal Object of Dennis Cooper's Affections, even if the ur-example of this object has changed from the first novel's Keanu Reeves circa River's Edge to now Alex James, the bassist of '90s Britpop band Blur (who actually appears as a character here in this novel, and proceeds to get roofied and then molested by Dennis's friend while Dennis watches in rapt adoration, which makes me wonder what exactly James thought of all this when the book first came out as the splashy, high-profile follow-up to his commercial breakthrough Try). And like always, the vast majority of the sex depicted follows Cooper's super-specific fetishistic obsession with ass-rimming, and especially his ongoing violent fantasy about encountering an ass so perfect and magical that people are compelled to chop it up with a knife so they can get into the religiously profound black hole found at the center of it (here finally played out to its cartoonishly extreme logical end by a sadistic dwarf [!!!], who does precisely this to one of our characters, just to find a "turd pearl" inside made up of a petrified piece of feces coated milky white from the dried semen of a thousand previous rapists, and if that image disgusts you then you're on the wrong freaking book page, my friend, and you need to leave right this second and forget that you ever heard the name Dennis Cooper to begin with). But all of it just feels like window-dressing at this point, silly little stories designed specifically to keep the sociopaths at the MTV marketing department doing their happy little dances while green dollar bill signs flash in their eyeballs. The only parts truly interesting enough to indicate that Cooper actually gave a damn about them include the stuff at the beginning about his youthful adventures in religious revelation, and the part at the end where he finally explains why this entire book cycle is named after George Miles in the first place (who turns out to have been a very real person from Cooper's actual real life, who he met when he was 17 and George was 13, and who he developed a debilitating chaste love for that was never returned, with Cooper admitting that all the books in this series have been his attempt to try to capture those fleeting, intense kind of emotions that we only experience as teens when we fall in love for the very first time). That stuff is fascinating, and it's half-shame and half-tragedy that he felt the need (or perhaps the Corporate Machine around him felt the need) to surround this fascinating stuff with 150 pages of "The Poor Man's Jean Genet" material, which has long lost its shtick by this point in the series. Only one more book to go, blessedly, until I'm finally finished, 2000's Period (published just before the events of September 11th hammered the final nail into the coffin of the New Transgressive movement for good), so as always keep your eye out for that review in another few days. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 18, 2021
|
Jul 18, 2021
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Paperback
|
|
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|
|
my rating |
|
|
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.12
|
it was ok
|
Jun 12, 2024
|
Jun 12, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.99
|
liked it
|
May 2024
not set
|
May 01, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.82
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 16, 2024
|
Apr 16, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.41
|
really liked it
|
Jan 29, 2024
not set
|
Jan 29, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.41
|
really liked it
|
Jan 27, 2024
not set
|
Jan 27, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.34
|
did not like it
|
Dec 09, 2023
|
Dec 09, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.92
|
really liked it
|
Oct 22, 2023
not set
|
Oct 22, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.69
|
it was ok
|
Jan 16, 2023
|
Jan 16, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.70
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 15, 2023
|
Jan 15, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.00
|
liked it
|
Jan 08, 2023
|
Jan 08, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.81
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 06, 2023
|
Jan 06, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 1.00
|
did not like it
|
Jan 03, 2023
|
Jan 03, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.63
|
it was ok
|
Jan 02, 2023
|
Jan 02, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.12
|
it was ok
|
Jan 2023
|
Jan 01, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.17
|
it was amazing
|
Dec 28, 2022
|
Dec 28, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.72
|
really liked it
|
Dec 20, 2022
|
Dec 20, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 2.74
|
liked it
|
Dec 19, 2022
|
Dec 19, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 4.16
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.85
|
did not like it
|
Jul 18, 2021
|
Jul 18, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.02
|
liked it
|
Jul 18, 2021
|
Jul 18, 2021
|
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