Review: What did I read?
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 04 7, 2014
This is one of the most utterly masochistic books I've ever read.  Forget consensual power exchange, I don't know if the author is even familiar with the term (I know for sure that the two main characters aren't).  There is nothing wrong with reading a book where characters make mistakes or are unpleasant people, but the female main doesn't possess a bit of self-awareness and the male main is cryptic to an extreme.  I will be discussing some specifics of the plot below.Lorraine is a young woman who interviews for a job as a personal assistant.  Stephen Browman (get used to reading the name like that, for the majority of the book everyone refers to him by his full name) is a hot young billionaire with intimacy/control issues (the only type of billionaire in fictionland).  He decided to fill the empty spot on his slave roster by holding interviews for a personal assistant job that is fictional -- the only job requirement is to be "his property."  This seems like an extremely inefficient way to fill the position -- even after he eliminated all the people who didn't meet his personal preferences (wrong gender, wrong age, not attractive to him, etc), many women would be uninterested in a job/relationship that would only meet the needs of a sexual minority.Well, whatever, right?  Anyway, Lorraine does well on the interview and is immediately offered a job.  Stephen Browman asks her to sign a contract which she, like any adult, signs without even skimming it.  Strangely, she never goes back to read it, even when subsequent events indicate that being Stephen Browman's personal assistant is unlike any job found outside of the recent flood of "Fifty Shades" tribute erotica.  I don't know . . . once I realized I had agreed to be a billionaire's sex puppet instead of the quotidian personal assistant job I thought I was accepting, I'd be interested in knowing the exact details of what he expected from me and what obligations the contact held me to (or what he was obligated to provide to me).  But Lorraine is just a dandelion seed floating on the wind.  She's gormless and formless, the literary equivalent of a plastic bag waiting for a breeze to pick it up.Stephen Browman goes beyond physical sadism, he's a practitioner of emotional sadism.  He delights in leaving Lorraine in doubt about what is happening, often refuses to speak to her when they are alone, never consults her about any of her needs, blatantly carries on relationships with other women (without discussing this with her), and deliberately causes the end of her marriage.Oh yeah, did I mention that Lorraine is married?  If authors didn't write about adultery, we'd certainly be deprived of some of our greatest works of literature.  I have no expectation that characters in books make good decisions or be decent people.  Yet Lorraine's actions in relationship to her husband are inexplicable and the author offers no help to the reader who may be confused about what is happening.  She isn't confronted with a moment of weakness -- she makes a deliberate choice to become a rich man's sexual plaything because . . . she's bored?  If she'd been trying to work things out with her husband, tried to talk about needs that weren't being met, things would have made a lot more sense.  But it seems like she just chucks her relationship away and, when her husband refuses to accept that she's rather sleep with Stephen Browman than pay attention to anything he has to offer, she acts like she's the victim.When her husband does leave her, her self-pity boggles the mind.  What did you think would happen, Lorraine?  Women usually don't get to have richly rewarded kinky affairs with cruel billionaires AND stay in their comfortable marriages.  Lorraine's self-delusion is epic and it reads to me as if the author is indulging it, that we're supposed to identify with her sadness and grief over losing her marriage.In the midst of all this, we have some by-the-numbers dom/sub sex scenes and a hideously gothic is-he-a-killer-or-isn't-he subplot featuring Stephen Browman's evil (or is he?) pal, Van der Mere (I think that's his name, I read this book last week and my brain is trying to jettison the details as we speak).I found this book actively offensive -- not to moral standards, but on a literary level.  The author has made no effort to present consistent characters.  It makes the characterization in "Fifty Shades" read like Nabokov.  Enter at your own risk.