Review: Strange journey of a submissive
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 31, 2012
Kinked Sober is written in an unusually passive tone, but I feel like it was done this way on purpose, almost like it's part of Venica's characterization. Venica is very proud of how beautiful she is, how beautifully she submits, at how perfect a slave she is able to be.So during her time at Bravada, a slave training facility, the Dommes work to destroy that pride so Venica can truly be submissive. They feel Venica takes power away from her tops by being perfect to a fault. My feeling is that the "sober" part, and the 12 Step references are significant to Venica's addiction to pain, not significant to alcoholism.The prose is oddly lyrical, and yet at times harsh. The vocabulary is strange and sometimes completely mystifying, and yet I can't say that I didn't like it.Here are a couple examples of what I mean:"Once Domina was satisfied that the scent and essence of a woman had fully infiltrated Venica's physical disparity, she rose from atop her...""But then she had a feeling she did not recognize. Was it panic? Desperation? It stirred inside her, drilled at her, almost like a thought adorned her subconscious and unbeknownst to her, she fought whatever realization was trying to surface.""It [a vibrator] rattled under her fingers, sliding about frantic from the heavy coating of extract.""Venica was too beautiful, too enriching and she simply harmonized too well with the rope that lynched her arms."Private parts were called many unusual things:"tightness of her femininity" - "her indecency" - "plump endeavor" - "her wet insatiability" - "her sensitivity" - "[anus] her most sacred of area"The entire tone of the book is kind of soft and dreamy because of the interesting choice of words, and yet the subtext of a sentence with the words "harmonized" and "lynched" is NOT soft at all.Readers who enjoy erotic fantasy and unusual description will like this book. Readers who expect comprehensive world and character-building, and active voice might not like it so much.Ultimately, I found Kinked Sober to be a very unusual read, and I liked it more than I disliked it, but the writing style took some getting used to, and some of the word choices pulled me right out of the story to reach for a dictionary.