Review: Powerfully Seductive and Sensually Evocative
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 28, 2013
A young girl's life is irrevocably changed when the new English high school teacher moves in next door to her.As she sits in her bedroom, not far from the window overlooking the new teacher's house, her longings for real, timeless love are evident from the perfect prose that this emerging sexual being writes in her diary along with the secret love letters she slips between the pages, and her clandestine, or so she thinks, almost voyeuristic observations of the "God" who lives next door, begin.Twenty-something years old, Solomon Andrews is spiritual, charismatic and beautiful.  A man who grew up in the immoral clutches of his mother where his first sexual encounter was downright sinful, he has a questionable past which threatens to catch up to him and has moved to this new town seeking a new life, perhaps some new conquests, "a field of skin yet to be tasted".  He soon realises that he is being observed but, used to the wide attention he generally receives from his female students, he tries to ignore the girl's attentions knowing that if he acts on his impulses there will, yet again, be dire consequences.Not long after a confrontation takes place in his driveaway between the girl and another female student from school, the perfumed love letters begin to arrive in his mail box.  He knows he should resist, but the girl's passionate declarations of love stir something deep inside him causing a yearning for something real and tangible.  When she finally presents herself to him, he is unable to resist the allure of teaching this naive young girl all he knows.Their illicit affair begins and the sexual awakening she has yearned for is made all the more beautiful as we see her become enraptured by his kind and gentle sexual teachings, yet he knows what they are doing is wrong, but he just can't see his way out.Unfortunately, and as they say, all good things must come to an end and, as a result of their affair being discovered, Solomon says goodbye to a town that held so many possibilities and leaves behind a broken-hearted young girl.As the emotional consequences of the heartfelt but forbidden union reverberate through the decades, we meet the young girl again, but this time as a thirty-something year old woman who has never quite been able to move past her memories of Solomon, remaining ever-hopeful that she will find "the one", constantly comparing every man who comes into her life with him.  On meeting Max, their attraction is almost instant and they begin a relationship, but still, she remains disillusioned about her sexual encounters and is unable to move past what her and Solomon shared.  When fate sees her and Solomon's paths crossing once again, we wonder who, at the end of the day, will have the power to sever a connection steeped in yearning.Having read a lot of erotica in the past and coming close to throwing most of them against the wall due to the bad writing and constant replay of the same old salacious smut, I was a bit hesitant to pick this novel up due to its genre labelling, in case I was disappointed.  I can excitedly say that while it has been classed as erotica, it is so much more than that and I was  hooked from the very first page.There is a love story of deep, emotional meaning contained within the covers of this book along with a well-rounded story and, while most of us are brought up to understand that any kind of sexual relationship between a teacher and student is taboo and we ultimately end up not transcending those moral and ethical boundaries, Kate Belle has not written about a teacher's debauched unions with under-age girls, but rather has created something beautiful and intensely intimate.This is a powerfully seductive, sensually evocative and tastefully written tale in which Kate Belle explores forbidden love and sexual desire with a narrative that is lyrical and filled with substance.