To be totally honest the reason I read this book is because of the naked man shackled on the cover. What exactly I was expecting from a book with a naked man shackled on the cover is anybody’s guess, but I certainly got significantly less.

As far as I can tell, the plot goes like this. A woman wants desperately to escape a forced marriage to a man she despises and hie off to a life of adventure traveling through "tunnels" to different worlds. I’m absolutely positive that I didn’t expect much from the sci fi technology, but these "tunnels" wouldn’t hold water in a bucket.

The female character, Jenise, convinces the male Gian Ren to have sex with her so that she will lose her virginity and therefore be a less desirable bride. Gian Ren is a Familiar. Familiars are known for their incredible sexual prowess and, incidentally, can turn themselves into cats. Still with me? Good cause it gets worse. Gian and his people are gifted with the ability to recognize their one true love and he knows from the moment he sees Jenise that she is it. (Wouldn’t it be handy to be able to know on sight who your true love was?) Jenise’s character is flatter than the paper she’s printed on. Gian is only slightly better. And their motivations? You call these motivations?

They are supposedly being pursued by the jilted bridegroom, but he drops out of sight almost immediately and reappears once, late in the book for Gian to say ‘Haha, I have defeated your plans and taken the girl too.’ If Karpon (also known as the jilted bridegroom) had actually pursued Jenise and Gian it would have improved the book 200%. So in addition to flat characters I don’t care 2 pins about we have no threat to hustle the plot along.

There’s also a lot of other flotsam and jetsam floating around. She wants this to be a trilogy (or more) so she’s laced all these other plot lines about mystics and Gian’s relatives through the story. Unfortunately, since I refuse to read anything more by this woman, the extra, unresolved plot lines acted like junk DNA. Pointlessly hanging around and doing nothing.

And then there’s the sex. I’d like to announce here that I am not a prude. I have read Anais Nin, The Story of O, Anne Rice’s gawd awful Beauty trilogy and other stuff (including my husband’s Mara, Celtic Shamaness. In this book I think I counted 4 (not counting the deflowering at the beginning) major, graphic sex scenes, each icky in its own way. Icky how? Well, sample this. "Gian had expertly slid his rogue tongue between her lips and he was licking the inside of her mouth." It gives me the willies. If the writer thinks this is a great kiss I need to introduce her to a guy I know. Eww.

One sex scene bothered me to extreme. First of all, it’s a rape. Gian is overwhelmed with jealousy and carries Jenise to their room where he tears a silk sheet in half and uses it to tie her to the bed posts. Ok, anybody who managed to get past the tearing of the bed sheet (ever tried to tear silk without slitting it to start? It doesn’t, that’s why it was used in parachutes until nylon came along) is laughing hysterically over the tying part. The chief asset of silk is its slipperiness. Unfortunately this makes it a very bad restraint because the knots just slip apart. And if I remember correctly, the scene went on for like 4 pages.

And the icing on the cake? At one point in the book the author used ‘sexy’ as an adverb. Somebody did something sexily. I laughed so hard I nearly drowned myself (because i was reading in the bath tub again) and then at work the next day I cracked up a couple of people.

So if you are tempted by the naked man on the cover, look, but don’t buy. Go get yourself a nice Black Lace erotica novel. The bits of those I have read are pretty good and make no bones about the fact that they are porn.


Recommended: No