THE BOOK OF TWENTY FOUR

TITLE: THE BOOK OF TWENTY-FOUR

AUTHOR: Nathan L. Flamank

Pages: ???

Date: 07/01/2013

Grade: 3

Details: A Seth & Amber Erotic Tale

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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. I won't say anything else about it here but do go into a bit more detail in my "If You Can't Stand the Heat" blog.

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.

SAVING CEECEE HONEYCUTT

TITLE: SAVING CEECEE HONEYCUTT

AUTHOR: BETH HOFFMAN

Pages: 375

Date: 07/01/2013

Grade:5-

Details: Large Print edition

Library

Cecelia Rose (CeeCee) Honeycutt is only twelve years old when her mother, Camille, dies in a terrible accident in 1967. By then she has been taking care of her psychotic mother for years while her father, a travelling salesman, spends less and less time at home. Camille who was born and raised in Georgia is deeply unhappy in Northern Ohio; so unhappy that eventually she rejects her everyday reality and lives her life as if it is 1951 and she has just won a Georgia beauty pageant. With her mother going around town in elaborate party dresses and a tiara in her hair, CeeCee has become the laughing stock among her peers. Without friends and with responsibilities beyond her years, CeeCee’s only support is Mrs. Odell an elderly neighbour.

After her mother’s dead CeeCee’s father decides that she would be better of living with her great-aunt Tootie in Savannah. Rejected by her father and forced to leave behind the only person to ever take care of her, CeeCee travels to her new home with a heavy heart and only Mrs. Odell’s words to give her strength:

“When a chapter of your Life Book is complete, your spirit knows it’s time to turn the page so a new chapter can begin. Even when you’re scared or think you’re not ready, your spirit knows you are.”

And Savannah really is a new page in CeeCee’s Life Book. From her aunt who never seems to stop and can’t think bad about anybody to Oletta Jones the house cook, from the eccentric neighbour looking for Nirvana and prone to taking naked midnight baths to the rude lady having an affair with a local policeman, the women in her new town welcome the lost girl with open arms and show her life beyond the sadness.

Over the course of a long, hot summer CeeCee learns about love, acceptance, prejudice, loyalty as well as rules to live by:

“Don’t grow up too fast darling. Age is inevitable, but if you nurture a childlike heart, you’ll never ever grow old.”

It will take CeeCee a while to get over the guilt she feels about her mother’s dead and the fear she has that she, like her mother, is destined to one day lose her mind. But when she does - thanks to all the strong and loving women in her life – she also finds the strength to forgive herself and accept that, even at her maddest moments, her mother loved her; a realisation that brings back words her mother once spoke:

“It’s how we survive the hurts in life that brings us strength and gives us our beauty.”

This is an emotional roller-coaster of a book. It is impossible not to have your heart break when you read about young CeeCee dealing with her mother’s madness and the pain and feelings of guilt she goes through after her mother dies. But it is equally impossible not to smile and even laugh at the antics the ladies in Savannah get up to occasionally and by the end of the book your heart will rejoice at CeeCee’s new found happiness and faith in the future.

In CeeCee Honeycutt Beth Hoffman has created a realistic and endearing character that will stay in your thoughts long after you finish the book. The author has managed to perfectly catch the thoughts and feelings of a twelve year old girl with the weight of the world on her young shoulders. CeeCee is a child who knows far too much about everything that can be wrong in the world and that comes across clearly.

CeeCee’s new home in Savannah is described with almost cinematic clarity; I could hear the voices, see the old houses, the gardens and taste the glorious food.

This is a beautiful and emotional story about love and survival with a realistic and wonderfully uplifting ending. This is a lovely read!

INTRODUCING A NEW BLOG

IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT…

Stay out of the kitchen or, in this case, start a new blog.

It was May, 2012 when curiosity got the better of me and I picked up Fifty Shades of Grey. I reviewed that book as well as its two sequels on in this blog and followed that up with a post on the trilogy as a whole and therefore won’t be going into what I thought about the books, the story-line, the writing or the phenomena here again. I will admit though that reading those three books awakened in me a taste for erotic stories that I thought I had left behind when I ended my teenage years.

 

Eight months and 46 erotic books and stories later I’ve come to the conclusion that I enjoy the genre too much to give up on it again. I have however also discovered that it is very hard to do (some of) these works justice in a general blog that can be read by anybody. While it is quite possible to give short descriptions and my thoughts on these books without using language or descriptions that might offend some people it does mean that there are huge sections of story I can only refer to in the most general of terms. This is not always satisfying for me and I imagine that it can also be frustrating for those reading the reviews because they want to find out more about the erotic content of a book – the part that I tend to describe in only the vaguest of terms.

I’ve thought about all of this for quite a while now and have decided that the only thing to do is start a second book blog. From this moment onward every work of erotica will be reviewed in both blogs. While More Than a Reading Journal will continue to describe the books and stories in the most general and “inoffensive” of terms, If You Can’t Stand the Heat will allow me to give more graphic details of the stories and to explore my thoughts and feelings about those. Because I won’t be mincing my words in the new blog I’ve added an age-barrier to it. Anybody wanting to read that blog will have to confirm that they are over 18 years of age. While I’m aware that this is a voluntary barrier and in no way stops anybody from reading my posts there, it will serve as a warning for those who would rather not be confronted with adult content.

I’m playing with the idea of doing a bit more than just book reviews in this new blog. I think I may also indulge in posts in which I explore my likes and dislikes in this genre and maybe even try my hand at a bit of creative writing. I don’t know yet. In many ways a new blog is like a blank page; it can be filled with anything and everything that springs to mind. The only thing I know for sure right now is that I will be reviewing my kinky reads in far more detail than I have been doing so far, everything else is “wait and see” both for the reader and for the writer.

HOSTILE TAKEOVER

TITLE: HOSTILE TAKEOVER

AUTHOR: JOEY W. HILL

Pages: 408p

Date: 05/01/2013

Grade: 4.5

Details: no. 5 Knights of the Board Room

              Received from Ellora’s Cave

              Through NetGalley

Own/Kindle

Warning: The following is a review of a full-on BDSM erotica novel. Although the review itself won’t be (sexually) explicit, this book is. A more indepth and explicit review of this book can be found on IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT...

“It wasn’t about denigrating a woman’s independence. It had nothing to do with the men’s opinion of female capability, but everything to do with their absolute conviction that a man’s role was to protect and cherish.”

Ben is the only one of his friends still single. The other four Knights of the Board Room have found their submissive soul-mates and have started their happily every afters. Ben tells himself this doesn’t bother him. He knows he is the most hardcore Dominant of the group, he just wasn’t made for a lasting relationship; short-term, one-off scenes without emotional entanglements are more his style and he has no intention of changing that.

Marcie has been in love with Ben since she was sixteen. As she grew up and discovered exactly what sort of relationships the other knights had with their women she also realised that she, like her sister and the other women, is a submissive. But Marcie is a smart girl and for years she’s allowed Ben to treat her like a close friend while treating him the same. Now that she is 23 years old and finished with her studies, Marcie is ready to show Ben exactly what she is and that not only does she love, want and need him but that, deep down, he feels the same about her.

As Marcie and Ben spend time together the Dom realises that Marcie touches him in ways that scare him; she makes him feel things he didn’t know he could feel and, more importantly, doesn’t want to feel. And if the only way to get her out of his life again is by emotionally hurting her in a way he would never physically hurt her, he’ll do just that. Even if that course of action brings with it the risk of alienating his life-long friends as well. What Ben hasn’t counted on is that although Marcie may be submissive in every way it counts, she wouldn’t submit if it means giving up on her own happily ever after with the man she has loved for so long. She may be wishing for unconditional surrender to Ben, but that won’t stop her from mounting a hostile take-over if that’s the only way to get what they both want.

I think I’m starting to repeat myself in these reviews, but I’ll say it again; this book is definitely not for everyone. While it is a typical romance in structure and ending, it is anything but when it comes to the content for the story. Whereas a romance may have some erotic content, it will always be an added extra to all the other ways in which the two main characters pursue each other. In this book, on the other hand, the erotic content forms the basis of the romantic journey. Ben and Marcie have been friends for years; they don’t need to get to know each other. Instead Marcie needs to make Ben see and appreciate her in a different light and the only way to do that is through submitting to him; allowing him to indulge all is dominant and sadistic desires on her while she gets her submissive needs met in scenes that will shock many. This doesn’t mean there aren’t touching and incredibly tender moments in this story too. At one point I was reading with tears in my eyes because of the way in which Ben opened up to his feelings, his emotions and the love he had been denying (himself) for so long.

Marcie is a wonderful character. At heart a true submissive, she has the strength and courage to push the man she wants to dominate her. The way she is described in this book made me feel I really got to know, like and admire her. Ben, on the other hand, can be harder to like on several occasions, culminating in one passage where I would have lovingly beat the shit out of him. But this does make him a more realistic character and does add to the tension in the story.

The writing in this book is smooth and the dialogue flows naturally. The author’s great achievement in my opinion is that she managed to give us characters the reader can recognise and sympathise with while presenting them in a life-style that is, probably, completely foreign to them.

This is the fifth book in a series, but since I haven’t read the first four books I can confidently say that it can be read as a stand-alone. Of course if you were to do that you do run the risk that, like me, you end up buying the first book even before you finish this one.

This may be a book with a lot of graphic and not at all conventional intimacy in it, but when all is said and done, a love story is still a love story. And as love stories go, this is a wonderful one.

THE MADNESS UNDERNEATH

British Cover

TITLE: THE MADNESS UNDERNEATH

AUTHOR: MAUREEN JOHNSON

Pages: 352

Date: 02/01/2013

Grade: 5

Details: no. 2 Shades of London

              Received from Harper Collins

              Through NetGalley

              Young Adult

Own/Kindle

Please note that this book won’t be published until February 26 in the USA and March 28, 2013 in England.

It has been three weeks since Aurora (Rory’s) almost fatal encounter with The Ripper Killer and she is in Bristol with her parents recuperating. Except that being away from London is not helping Rory at all. She can’t tell her parents, never mind the therapist she’s seeing, the truth about what happened to her. The only people who she can talk to are Stephen, Callum and Boo the other Shades who, like her, can see and communicate with Ghosts and they are still in the capital. Then the unexpected happens; Rory is given the opportunity to go back to school, back to London and it is an opportunity she grabs with both hands.

Back in London it becomes clear that Rory’s encounter with The Ripper Killer may have unleashed new horrors into the area surrounding her school. And Stephen appears very reluctant to allow her to get really involved with the work he and his two colleagues do. To top it all off Rory also finds that life at school is as hard as life with her parents; she can’t tell the truth there either. On the upside, Rory’s new power makes her feel more secure and she meets a new therapist. And talking to this woman does make Rory feel a lot better.

But danger lurks. There are two unexplained deaths to resolve. And danger does not always come from the place you’d expect.

American cover

This was a wonderful paranormal thriller. I mean the first book, TheName of the Star, was good but this one is better. Rory, the main character is still feisty and funny but now that she has big issues to deal with she is also a lot more interesting. Her sense of isolation and her despair at not being able to talk to anybody about her special abilities is completely believable and make her a more rounded character. She is a real teenager; not a kid anymore and able to think things through most of the time, but not quite patient enough to give things time to develop; she needs her solutions now! I also love Rory’s voice. While reading the book I felt as if she was speaking straight to me, I could hear her and the things she thought and said had me laughing out loud on several occasions.

The writing in this book is smooth and easy to read while the events in the story ensure that it is almost impossible to put the book aside, even for a short while. This story has the right balance of fun, action, tension and emotional issues. This is a well-plotted story with well-rounded characters, but boy what an ending. Where the first book can be read as a complete story in and off itself, there is no doubt that this book a part of a series. There are a host of unresolved issues when this book ends and I know that it is going to be a long and frustrating wait for the third book and the chance to find out what will happen next.

READING DUTCH

I have been pondering this decision for a while now. I'm not really into reading challenges. Yes, I set myself a reading goal for the year on Good Reads - 150 books for 2013 - but other than that I usually just read whatever happens to strike my fancy at any given moment, or any title that is up for review. But when I saw this challenge to read a certain amount of books written by Dutch authors in the original language I was tempted. 

Of course it isn't as easy as it sounds since I live in Ireland and Dutch books are few and far between in the shops here. On the other hand I do have two or three unread books by Dutch authors on my shelves and the husband and I hope to travel to Holland later in the year so I decided that I could probably manage at least 5 books, which is the minimum amount in this challenge.

So the level I'm aiming for is called "Speculaasje" (which is a Dutch, spiced biscuit, as shown in the picture above). I hope I will manage to read more than five Dutch books this year, but considering the constraints I'll be reading under, this seems a reasonable goal. 

These are the books I already have in my possession and will be reading in 2013:

1. Een Rus in de Jordaan by Baantjer & de Waal
2. Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda
3. Zolang er Leven is by Renate Dorrestein
4. Is er Hoop by Renate Dorrestein.

What the fifth book will be and whether or not I'll read more than five books depends on whether or not I'll make it to Holland and what I'll pick up once I'm there.

Phew, decision has been made and I have to say I'm suddenly really looking forward to reading these books.

If you are interested in this challenge you can find the post in which it was launched by De Boekblogger here. But remember, like the books to be read for this challenge, that blog is in Dutch.

Update:
I just exchanged comments with Judith, the organiser of this challenge and she mentioned to me that if anybody would like to join in who doesn't know Dutch they could just read translations of books by Dutch authors. Let me know if you're interested and I'll make sure the instructions to this challenge are made available in English, either here or on Judith's own blog.

RELEASE ME

TITLE: RELEASE ME

AUTHOR: J. KENNER

Pages: 352

Date: 01/01/2013

Grade: 4-

Details: no. 1 Stark Trilogy

              Received from Random House

              Through NetGalley

Own/Kindle

When Nikki Fairchild first met Damian Stark she was still in the beauty pageant circuit she hated. Although she felt a strong attraction to him she found herself completely tongue-tied. When he left with another woman on that occasion she had the impression that he was sorry he had to leave, but that, she decides, was probably wishful thinking.

When Nikki meets Damian again she has finished college, left her overbearing mother and Texas behind her and has just started a new job in Los Angelos. She is at a private showing of erotic paintings with her boss who hopes to meet the rich and powerful Mr. Stark to interest him in sponsoring a product he’s developing. Nikki is there as the beautiful body to help clinch the deal. From the moment Damian and Nikki set eyes on each other there is electricity in the air. He intimidates and irritates her yet she feels a constant and irresistible pull towards him. And the pull appears mutual. In fact, Damian has a proposition for her; since he can’t find an erotic painting that works for him he wants her to model for one. He wants her to model for this picture for one week; one week during which she will give herself to him completely. In return he will give her one million dollars. Since Nikki has dreams of starting her own company and is secretly excited about spending a week submitting herself to this man, she says yes. But, agreeing to his terms means showing all of herself to Damian and that includes the scars from the past she so desperately wants to hide; scars that may scare him away for ever. And she’s not the only one with issues; Damian has a few of his own and he is determined to keep them secret, even from the woman he feels irresistibly drawn towards.

With personal issues between them and outside forces determined to destroy Damian, these two lovers have the odds stacked against them. The question is whether or not the forces that pull them together are strong enough to combat those that are trying to keep them apart.

If you think the above description of the plot sounds (vaguely) familiar you are right. There are quite a few similarities between this book and the Fifty Shades Trilogy by E.L. James and Sylvia Day’s Crossfire Trilogy. But, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Everywhere I’ve looked this book is advertised as a read for those who enjoyed those two series. So, when I saw the negative reviews by people who complained about this being a book about yet another young and incredibly handsome billionaire with a troubled past I had to wonder if the people who wrote those reviews actually bothered reading the blurb before they decided to read the book. If they had, they would have known that they were picking up a read that would remind them (strongly) of those other books. And if you receive what you’re asking for you really don’t have a good reason to complain in my opinion. Yes, indeed, there are strong similarities between all these books, in fact it is reaching the stage where I feel that “Troubled Billionaire” could almost become a genre all of its own. But really, that is nothing new. I mean, are we also going to complain about harlequin/Mills & Boons books having similar and predictable plots? The only fair way to judge a book is, in my opinion, on whether or not the writing is any good, the story holds your attention and the characters are believable and well-developed. And as far as those criteria are concerned, this is not a bad book at all. The writing is definitely better than what I found in the Fifty Shades books and the story held my attention. Maybe some of it was a bit predictable but that didn’t stop me from turning the pages and wanting to find out what was going to happen next. As for the characters, they also come with traits I have come across before. But I felt that they had enough unique traits to make them interesting, especially since they are not as black and white (or dominant versus submissive) as they are in the earlier works.

Having said all that, I do feel that from now on I will have to be a bit more selective when it comes to my erotic fiction choices. I’m going to have to steer clear of troubled billionaires for a while or run the risk of turning into one of those reviewers I’ve spend so much time giving out about above. Mind you, I still intent to read the third Crossfire book and wouldn’t be at all surprised if I also end up reading the rest of this trilogy - if only to satisfy my curiosity – but other than that I’ll be looking for different sort of kink from now on.

This is the perfect read for anyone who wants a story that closely reminds them of the Fifty Shades and/or Crossfire books. Just try not to be upset when you get exactly what you’re asking for.