Grade: C-

I just recently started buying e-books (I had known about them, but just never ordered them), so lately they’re all I’ve been reading, completely neglecting my print TBR. For some a reason that I do not want to explore or psycho-analyze at the moment, I seem to be drawn to BDSM stories. I really liked the previous one I had read because it was about a woman taking charge of her sexuality and the direction of her love life and really getting what she wanted out of it. There was a sassy, empowering vibe to the story and I really dug it. This latest one, however, just made me feel… dirty. Darlings, I have a great respect for smut. I love smut, so believe me when I say that hardly anything ever makes me feel dirty, but this little e-book did. The Dom in this story is a man, but that’s not the only thing that differentiates it from Vaughan’s story; no, there is true tenderness in that Dom. Every whip, every slap she bestowed upon her sub, you can see that there is kindness, there is love behind it. Here it’s just disrespect and that makes this story dirty (and not in a good way).

The heroine in this story, Nicole, is a successful young lawyer whose grandmother had recently died. While cleaning up her grandmother’s attic, Nicole encounters a locked strongbox which intrigues her, but is unable to find the key for it. While trying to locate the key, she receives a phone call from a man who was familiar enough with her grandmother to ask for her by her name, but was unaware that she had died. Nicole informs the man that her grandmother had died, but the man hangs up before she can ask him any questions. Finally, she locates the key and opens the strongbox, not at all expecting that what she would find inside would be a handful of composition books that look like diaries. At first she is reluctant to read them, but curiosity gets the best of her, and she starts to read them. As it turns out, her lovely, loving, kind grandmother had lived with a deep, dark secret: she was a submissive to her boss, the same man who had called on the phone asking for her.

The first thing Nicole does is tell her boyfriend, Brad, who is also an attorney at the firm where she works. As she and Brad explore the pages of the diaries together, a previously unseen side of Brad appears, and Nicole is fascinated to find that he has become more demanding, more forceful in their lovemaking. Brad has never been particularly shy in their lovemaking, but now there’s a more authoritative, almost dominating side to him. At first, Nicole thinks Brad is only playing, but as they continue to read about the developing dom-sub relationship of her grandmother and her boss, Brad gets bolder and more daring. Suddenly, he is insisting that they push their relationship toward that of a Master and a Slave, but instead of running away like a sane person would in that situation, Nicole not only stays, but plays along. Even when homeboy starts calling her a “slut”. It gets to the point that Nicole becomes obsessed with Brad’s kind of loving, finds herself thinking about nothing but him and what he does to her. Brad, on the other hand, megalomaniacal bastard that he is, digs this submissive, almost pathetically needy side of Nicole, and takes advantage of it. Oh, hell no!

There are two stories in this book. One is that of Nicole and Brad and the other is that of Nicole’s grandmother Elizabeth and her boss Mr. Stevenson. Of the two, I found Elizabeth’s story more interesting because one of my Favorite Movies of All Time is Secretary, and this story reminded me enough of that movie that somebody ought to be suing someone. Elizabeth isn’t prone to cutting herself when she felt depressed like Lee did, nor was she an unmarried woman living with her parents; in fact, she is a married woman with three kids and a husband who doesn’t satisfy her sexually. The differences pretty much end there. Elizabeth, like Lee, works in a law office for a stern, forbidding, but extremely proper man like the James Spader character. He even has a deep voice! At first, Elizabeth is wary of him, especially when he starts rapping at her knuckles and her butt with a wooden rule whenever she messes up. Gradually, she starts getting used to his little punishments and starts to crave them. She begins to mess up on purpose, hoping it would incur his wrath and he would punish her, but he immediately catches on to her tricks, and tells her that he is not playing a game. He tells her that it is a lifestyle and she was born to be a slave. Eventually, they settle into a routine of a master and a slave that becomes almost like a normal marriage. What’s interesting about their relationship is that it is obvious that Elizabeth becomes involved with him out of her own free will. She is a strong, capable woman who chose this path for herself. In the beginning, Mr. Stevenson may have bullied her into it by holding her job over her head, but then it becomes immediately clear that it’s not about that. Elizabeth wants to do this. Elizabeth wants to be a slave, but what’s fascinating about it is that at the same time, she is aware of the power she holds over her master.

Nicole, on the other hand, is a fucking sissy and Brad, her boyfriend, is a sleazebag. When they start reading the diaries, Brad immediately sees that Nicole is turned on by it, so he takes advantage of it. It quickly becomes a game of “What else can I make this bitch do?” and that’s totally creepy. The stuff he makes her do, the way he makes her do it, is totally degrading, but Nicole, the MORON, doesn’t see any of it. I totally understand wanting to please your man and stuff, but this dude calls her a slut, while he’s making her go down on him, and there’s just this really gross oral sex scene where it’s clear that she’s totally uncomfortable with the situation, almost choking on his penis (gah, I just threw up in my mouth), but he doesn’t relent! There’s no safe word or nuthin’. He calls her his “perfect submissive whore” and maybe I just don’t understand the whole BDSM thing, but I’ve read enough about it, and what makes it work is that behind any BDSM relationship, there is trust, respect, and real affection. It becomes obvious, though, that this Brad guy is just using her. There’s this other scene that totally creeps me out where he’s got his hands around her throat and she’s thinking that he’s strong enough to strangle her and kill her, but it just turns her on more. He even brags about her in a way that a high school boy does when he tricks some dumb broad into giving him a blow job in the backseat of his car. Oh, and get this: later on in the story, they run into Mr. Stevenson, and Brad allows him to whip Nicole. Gross. And I can’t get over the fact he calls her a slut disrespectfully and she doesn’t kick him in the balls for it.

All and all, this e-book just makes me want to take a long, scalding shower with bleach and a steel brush. The relationship between Elizabeth and Mr. Stevenson is scintillating, even scandalous, because it happened in the early sixties. Back then, when a woman was expected to stay at home and take care of her kids, Elizabeth found herself a job and managed to land herself a sizzlin’ love affair. If it had been about their affair alone, this book would have gotten a higher grade; what brought it down is the creepy relationship of Brad and Nicole. Brad, you see, is a true sadist. There really is no tenderness in his touch. It is obvious that he has no respect for Nicole as a human being. It would have been an alright story if Nicole had a backbone, but it just really seemed that she was just going along with everything Brad said, not because she’s a submissive or anything, but because she can’t think for herself. As a reader, I just got this feeling that somewhere along the way, Brad will accidentally kill Nicole by strangling her, choking her by shoving his penis down her throat, or severely beating her with his whip, and the sad part is, Nicole will be a wiling participant in all of it. This story makes me want to almost turn away from this genre, but I just started reading Holding All the Cards by Joey W. Hill and she writes pain like poetry. Save me, Joey W. Hill, save me!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2005 at 8:19 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: C, Romance: Contempo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.