Review: Mixed Bag: Intriguing Plot, Hella Bad Sex Euphemisms, Some Racial Fetishizing
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 20, 2014
This is a story of a very graphic and intense BDSM Master/Slave relationship, and parts of it were very interesting and parts of it disturbed me deeply.The Positive: I found the plotting/construction of this book to be very unusual and intriguing. The main characters are Master Jonathan and slave Dara. This is Dara's first BDSM relationship, and she agreed to submit to Jonathan's training for one year. That year is about to end, and their relationship is at a crossroads: will Dara agree to stay and make their arrangement permanent, or not? It's an open question, because, as much as she gets into the sex, Dara has a traumatic past (don't they all?), and she hasn't been entirely honest with Jonathan while they've been together. The story is told in the present -- as Jonathan and Dara each prepare for their one year anniversary, at which the question of permancy will be settled -- but interspersed with their preparations are flashbacks to earlier points in their relationship and also flashbacks of their lives before they met each other, including Dara's trauma and how Jonathan discovered BDSM. All of this skipping around might have been choppy or distracting, but I thought it was well done.The Neutral: The sex is very, very graphic, and some of it is titillating, and some of it made me wince. Everyone's tastes are different, but there's enough variety here that if you like BDSM erotica at all, you'll probably find something you're into.The Negative: Several of the sex scenes use laugh-out-loud atrocious euphemisms: 'meat stick' and 'sticky muffin' being just two of many.The Worst: Dara is of Asian descent, which is fine if she'd just happened to be Asian, but there were a few points where the fact that she is Asian (and Jonathan is white) was fetishized in a way that made me very, very uncomfortable.