Review: Angsty and not very evenly written
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 23, 2011
Warning: This review might contain what some people consider SPOILERS.Rating: 5/10PROS:- I'm a sucker for large, masculine, protective men, and Lucca fits that description perfectly. Plus, he's rich, successful, dominant, and amazing-looking. What's not to love in a hero like that? And his former Dom comes into the story about halfway through and turns out to be an older, slightly more stern version of Lucca. He's yummy, too. (In fact, Lucca has a whole squad of friends who are all hot, gay, tough, and kinky. Totally unrealistic, yes, but what a delightful fantasy.)- I've read quite a few BDSM novels, but never have I read one in which the sub is quite as big a handful as Christian is. He's angry, he's insolent, he's confused. It's exhausting sometimes to watch Lucca fighting for control over him, but I also found it captivating.- This book definitely doesn't brush past the action and suspense scenes. The part of the story when Christian is in captivity is well developed. There are also a lot of scenes that depict tough love, and while the characters' actions aren't exactly fun to read about, they are certainly admirable.CONS:- I didn't believe in Christian's desire to be such a hardcore submissive. He and Lucca play around a bit at the beginning of the story with bondage and spanking, but there's absolutely nothing said about any deep-seated desire Christian has to be treated like a sexual slave.- Some of the story's most important conversations are told rather than shown. Here's an example: "He explained, in a calm but authoritative voice, the truth of what it meant to be a submissive, or what it meant to give over control of oneself and to place complete trust in a Master." I wanted to actually SEE this discussion take place--not just to hear what Lucca thinks the "truth" about submission is, but also to see Christian's reactions to the subject.- A couple of secondary plots come to the forefront at different points in the story (one involving Christian's parents, and another involving Lucca's former Dom, Carl). I became just as interested in these stories as I was in the central conflict, but both of the secondary plotlines simply disappear about 70% of the way through, with nothing but a brief "here's what happened on that account..." at the very end.- Many scenes contain multiple POV shifts, which makes it difficult to tell whether you're seeing something happen from one character's perspective or another. The main reason these shifts were so jarring to me is that there's no pattern to them: it's not like one paragraph is from Character A and the next is from Character B. Sometimes there are 10 paragraphs from A, one from B, 3 more from A, 6 from B, and so on.Overall comments: This is not the sort of book I typically go for. But I have a friend who delights in making me read "messed up" stories like this one, probably so I can share in her anguish once she's read them. This book certainly has the angst: it shows a ton of painful moments and very few successes in the process of Christian's recovery. As a result, the ending felt extremely tenuous to me. The book does end well; I just wasn't crazy about the overall story or the writing, which I found uneven and inconsistent.