Grade: B-

Dear Bam,

I read The Taste Tester by Maeve Beckham and I promise you, this is not like any other romantica book you’ve read. Note that the title of the book is actually The Taste Tester From Ava’s Blog, and that is exactly what this book is; a series of blog entries detailing the relationship, or more specifically, the sexual relationship between Ava and her boyfriend Jack. That is not to say there is no relationship growth here; quite the opposite in fact. However, I’ll get to that later.

Jack and Ava are in a committed relationship, live together and have an active, healthy (so damn healthy that I’m jealous) sex life. While there are no multiple partner surprises, no aliens, vampires or were-people, nearly every variation of sex is explored in this book, with special emphasis on oral play. Holy fuck, that sounds so damn clinical. Let’s cut to the chase: Ava likes giving Jack BJ’s but hates swallowing because she thinks his jizz tastes like the floor of a movie theater after a showing of The Blair Witch Project. So she and Jack embark on a month-long plan to put Jack on different diets to try to improve the taste of his spunk. I noted that nearly every variation of sex is explored, right? Well, if you’re not into repeatedly reading about the fine details of sex, this book isn’t for you. However, Ms. Beckham can definitely write those details well and this book was quite a turn on.

Ava comes across as a regular, hardworking chick and but for the fact that she’s posting every single detail of her sexual escapades online, she seems a normal girl… whatever that really means. Jack, on the other hand, is nearly Mr. Perfect. He anticipates Ava’s desires and feelings with an ability that borders on supernatural, is able to read subtle body language and gives small gifts and gestures that are straight out of fantasy land. While this gave the book a slightly unreal quality, Ms. Beckham was able to bring things back to Earth with gems like this:

Sometimes I just want to throttle Jack. I was all excited about going to wine country for our anniversary, and then he went and annoyed the hell out of me by leaving all his packing either to…

1. The packing fairy

2. Me

3. “I’ll do it at 3:59. Hey, we’re only leaving at 4:00. That gives me a whole minute to pack.”

4. “Who needs to pack, we’re only going to be gone for three days?”

Now that is, for lack of a better expression, coffee-shooting-out-the-nose hilarious, because it is so DAMN TRUE! What this book lacked was more of the above (and the ensuing scenes where Jack and Ava worked out their frustrations, anger and annoyances through talking instead of sex). That, for me, was a major flaw of this book… it was too long for the narrow focus, and believe me, the focus remained extremely narrow. I think that the blog entry style detracted from a lot of the character growth in the book. Can there be an overabundance of sex in a book? Yes, definitely. While I enjoyed reading about the relationshippy parts of the book, I could open to any page and there was some sort of sexual act happening somewhere on the page, which took quite a bit of the, uh, bang out of all the banging. Ms. Beckham’s writing is engaging and she can get a page to smoke. I’m just sorry that there wasn’t more exploration of Ava and Jack’s relationship from a non-sexual standpoint. I’ll be sure to be on the lookout for more of her work. This one gets a B-.

xoxoxo…Shuz

If this sounds like your cuppa tea, you can buy it here!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 9:54 am and is filed under Books, Grade: B, Romance: Contempo, Shuzluva's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.