Review: Desire in Any Language by Anastasia Vitsky
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 27, 2014
This review can be found at The Blogger Girls review site.I’m going to be completely honest here. This is, more or less, my first F/F story that wasn’t just five pages. I was hesitant to read it because while I’m intrigued by the F/F genre, I don’t want erotica. I want romance. So, I was afraid that this book would lean more towards erotica than romance. In that, I was slightly correct but only because while this story ISN’T erotica, it neither is a romance. It’s more about self-discovery and accepting your desires, urges and ultimately yourself.Mira is an exchange student studying to become a translator. Unfortunately, she’s not very good at school. When she sees her adviser punishing a student who misbehaved, Mira becomes strangely fixated on the weapon used for the punishment. With Mira’s infatuation with her tutor and the ‘rod of love’, she slowly starts to let her studies go but when her tutor leaves Mira to get married, Mira completely falls apart; hurt to be left and confused about her feelings of being spanked. When her adviser returns, it pushes Mira to attempt her deepest desire but also forces her to seek what she desperately needs.This is an interesting tale of how Mira is trying to cope with her sudden desire of being spanked. On top of that, it’s hard for her to admit that she feels connected to her female tutor. She’s not looking for sex or lust, she’s looking for love. She wants to be held, cared for and cherished. It’s extremely hard for her to admit that she may be a lesbian and that there may be other women in the world she’s attracted to than just her adviser. She’s also confused on her desire to be disciplined, which causes her to make some rash and stupid choices that really could have gotten her killed, if she wasn’t so lucky.Which brings me to the few issues I had with this one. Mainly, the fact that it took almost the whole book to learn the tutor’s name really irked me. For a majority of the story, it’s either ‘she’, ‘her’, or tutor with barely a mention of the adviser’s name (aside from a joke about how it sounds close to a bad or inappropriate word, I think… I’m not quite sure on that). Beyond that, I’m still confused on where exactly Mira is studying. I feel as if it is somewhere with an Asian culture but it’s never mentioned where and that left me unable to understand most of what Mira was talking about.Besides that, I felt like Mira was very irresponsible and immature. For someone who came to another country with a dream of becoming a translator, she’s doing a very bad job of actually obtaining that dream and it wasn’t because she was trying to work through her sudden fixation on spanking. Even before she learned what the ‘rod of love’ was, she didn’t really care about her schoolwork, which made me constantly question how she could have been admitted into the school’s program in the first place and why she was even there anyway. Her constant response to her teachers/tutor when she couldn’t do anything was “I’ll do better next time” yet she never had any intention of doing that (she mentions that she knows she probably won’t do better next time). Aside from that, Mira read more like a 16 year old than a girl who has already finished college and is in her twenties (I’m guessing that’s her age). So, it was hard for me to really connect with Mira because she didn’t have many redeeming qualities, IMO.Overall, though, with the last chapter or so of this story, I became intrigued by Mira and where she was heading. She made some horribly idiotic decisions that were very naive and childish but I feel as though her meeting Hana at the very end might be the key to balancing out her self-destructive nature she was starting to develop. So, I’m curious what’ll happen from here; will Hana give Mira what she desires or will things just get worse for Mira? With the way Mira acts, I’m kind of guessing things will get worse before they get better lol.