Grade: A

Note: this is out in the UK now; out in the US in January.

Kristina Lloyd is a phenomenal writer. I picked up her first novel, Darker Than Love, in a second-hand bookshop. DTL is a fairly typical piece of historical erotica (ingenue heroine is kidnapped by pervert peer, subjected to unspeakable degradation and eventually rescued by handsome hero) but there was something about her prose that lifted it above the usual. It was enough to prompt me to buy her second novel set in contemporary Brighton, Asking For Trouble. That book blew me away.

Consequently I ordered Split from Amazon as soon as it came out in the UK and I was not disappointed. It’s another contemporary novel with the action taking place in the brooding Yorkshire Moors.

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Grade: B

Dear Bam,

I promised you a review of Dirty, and now that I’ve had quite a bit of time to think about the book, romance in general, and the genre… well I’m just as confused as ever. I would drop my $0.02 into the “what is romance” debate, but I don’t know what the answer is. I’ve read plenty of mainstream novels that could have been easily categorized as romance. I’ve read plenty of romance novels that could easily have been categorized simply as fiction. Let’s go with Dirty as a romance novel… well… fuck it. Here we go anyway:

I found the cover of this book to be quite titillating; a man and a woman sequestered in one bathroom stall, pink curly script, a simple, sexy title and the tagline “an erotic novel”. Well, I am one of those jackasses that judges a book by its cover. Yep… if the cover of your first publication is butt ugly (DEEP BREATH HERE - FIRST PUBLISHED STORY, YOU CRAZY BITCH!), I’m gonna cry. [Ed. Note: I have no idea what she’s talking about. hee!] But back to Dirty. When I picked it up at my local Borders, I thought “oh, goody! A hot romp of sex between two people that want it!” Well, smack me into next Tuesday for thinking that after looking at the cover. And the publisher should be smacked for doing a serious disservice to Megan Hart. The book was significantly deeper and much more complex that the silly cover led me to believe.

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