Review: Surprisingly Intense
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 9, 2014
Perfect light summer reading, here’s a well-written, entertainingly steamy erotic romp with an accessible, down-to-earth storyline, a realistic, relatable heroine, and a surprisingly intense turn-on factor. Australian author Elizabeta Brooke is one of the most accomplished young eroticists to appear on the scene in the last few years. Her brilliant debut novel “Never: An Erotic Retelling of Peter Pan”, and her beautifully crafted short story, “Poe”, have stayed with me like the most pleasant of memories, and are among the first titles I think of when asked to list the very best of contemporary erotica. [NOTE: I borrowed this title through Amazon Prime.]In this new short story Brooke stakes out somewhat more conventional fantasy real-estate, considerably lighter in tone and feel than her earlier outings, perhaps more broadly accessible, but still—as expected—impeccably written while always viscerally engaging. What I especially like about this story is the effort the author has made to get into her heroine’s head and stay there, describing not only the complex of  novel physical sensations accompanying each experience, but her emotional response to those sensations, her attempts to put them into some kind of rational context. (How will feeling this way affect my life? How will doing this thing that is objectively so wrong, but feels so incredibly good change my relationship with the other people in my life?)A straightforward plot description makes the story seem far more ordinary than it actually is, rather mundane, almost like the kind of softcore vignette you might see on late-Saturday-night cable TV. Susan, a thirtysomething housewife, reduced to selling cosmetics door-to-door (what in the states we call an Avon Lady) rings her best friend’s  bell, only to be met at the front door by the friend’s handsome eighteen-year-old son in nothing but a towel . . . and you can probably guess where things go from there. Except that the author has added a few interesting new twists and turnabouts with which to surprise her readers, and everything may not be quite as predictable as expected.  The story is too short either to excerpt or fully synopsize, so I will simply recommend the book, and let readers happily discover those twists on their own—believe me, they won’t be disappointed!