Review: Great Idea, disappointing execution
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 7, 2013
It is Seth's thirtieth birthday and his wife Amber wants to give him an extra special present. But what do you give a man who has everything his heart desires, the man you love dearly and who has given you so much happiness? Amber's solution is to give Seth a cheque-book containing 24 cheques. Each cheque represents one wish Amber will fulfil for Seth. What Amber hadn't quite counted on is Seth's clever but devious mind. He will only need to use two of his cheques to get everything he wants from her, indefinitely. The birthday weekend will be exhilarating, with both Amber and Seth discovering desires and pleasures they had never considered before.Well, I guess the love affair couldn't last indefinitely. Eventually I was bound to come across an erotic book that would fail to entice me.I really liked the idea behind the story. The present of a cheque book with 24 checks, each representing a wish, is a good one and gives the author endless potential. I also liked the way in which Seth surprised his wife with his first wish. In fact, at that early point in the story my expectations were high.But then it was as if the author went into overdrive. It was almost as if the author had been told that he would only be allowed to write one, short, book and he felt the need to put every single idea he had ever had into that one story. Everything you could possibly imagine was squashed into this one book. We have sex scene after sex scene but we also get an enormous amount of, at times unnecessary, background information.We didn't need to know about Amber being unable to conceive children or Seth's troubled childhood in order to follow them on their weekend of sexual exploration. Nor was there any need to mention Amber's unpleasant family. None of these issues or people play a role in or influence the story; they don't add anything but rather distract from the events during the weekend.I can only guess that the author had heard or read somewhere that readers like it when the characters in a story are fleshed out a bit and decided to do just that. And it might have worked if this had been a full length novel. With this being a rather short novella, everything in the book felt rushed. The reader is given details of Seth and Amber's lives, their backgrounds, their families and their sexual relations. We were told a lot about what they did, where they came from and their emotions but I never felt any of it. In fact I found myself caring very little for the characters and the descriptions of their sexual adventures left me mostly cold. And that can't possibly be right when you're reading an erotic story.As for those sexual adventures there is not a whole lot Amber and Seth don't try over the course of one weekend. We read about public sex, voyeurism, water-sports, masturbation and domination to name but a few. But again, it is rushed. The term "slam, bang, thank you ma'am" springs to mind. And I can't help wondering if the fact that this book was written by a man has anything to do with my issues with this book. Is it down to the male perspective that this book seemed to be more about intercourse than intimacy? Or am I just being horribly sexist here?If I had been able to talk to this author before he decided to publish this book I would have told him to go back to his drawing-board, take all his, rather good, ideas and allow for another 200 pages or so to flesh them out. The reason I'm rating this book as many as three stars is that I liked the idea and can see what this story could potentially be. I'm just sorry that this book didn't turn out to be what I hoped to find when I read the description on Amazon.