SANTA DADDY, kink romance for celebrating the holiday

SANTA DADDY
KEIRA ANDREWS
self-published (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Mall Santas aren’t supposed to be hot!

Hunter is hopelessly adrift after college. He’s still romantically inexperienced, can’t find a real job, and has no clue what to do with his life. Desperate, he returns to his humiliating old gig as an elf at the Santa's Village in his hometown's dying mall.

Enter the sexiest Santa ever.

Twice Hunter's size and age, lumberjack Nick makes Hunter tingle. Too bad he's super grumpy and intimidating. Years after the tragic death of his partner, Nick has his beagle and long, hard days on his Christmas tree farm. That’s plenty. But he can’t refuse a loyal friend’s plea for help and finds himself filling in as Santa. Despite Nick's attempt to stay aloof, the beautiful, anxious young man playing elf brings out his long-dormant daddy instincts.

Then a surprise blizzard traps them alone in Nick’s isolated forest home. Will they surrender to the sizzling spark between them and find the release and comfort they crave?

Santa Daddy is a sweet and spicy holiday gay romance from Keira Andrews featuring an age gap, m/m first times, role playing, Christmas romance feels, and of course a happy ending.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE GOODREADS M/M GIFT EXCHANGE. THANKS!

My Review: Spicy indeed! Eww-ick homophobes strongly cautioned.

Workplace romance that would get both guys canned (!) in 2025, with an age gap that would cause serious high-volume tuttage from the puritanical purseylipped posse of pisspots who decide these things for other people. I trust my strenuous exercise of kindness and diplomacy is masking my real feelings from their gaze or further contumely will head my way.

Those tedious persons dispensed with, we'll now enter the chatroom.

These men are insta-lust bonded, as a novella's limited size demands, and believably so to me, as they're each in very needy stages of their lives. Nick's lost a partner long enough ago that he's past the rawness of fresh grief. Hunter's out of school, transitioning to adulthood and as astrologers say, "void of course." He's casting about for what to do now, and meeting Nick plants the seeds of a future he realizes he wants. Nick, as Santa, is incongruous being so majorly studly and not a little grumpy of affect. Te saving grace for Nick is the way Hunter brightens his world. It's a little uncomfortable, he's told himself he's a hookups-only kinda guy, but Hunter...gets under his skin.

Of course he can't show that to Hunter. He presents himself as cold and judgmental. He's ready to be more but this is who he's been for so long that, well, the mask became the man.

Hunter's not having it. He's hot for the body and convinced there's a volcano under the snowpack. He's excited by the domineering way Nick chastises him for being late to work...he's got his kinky side...and wants a bit of the heat he feels coming off their mutual interest.

Generally daddy kink needs more room to develop than a novella. It works better if we see the men settling into their roles in the lifestyle, see them negotiating their needs from each other and finding the balance point between love and desire. That's something that's rushed through...dare I say past...in Santa Daddy.

I think this is a good chance to say these guys were made for this kink, they were just waiting for the right partner to come along. Nick even has moments, like in Ghost, where his dead partner urges him to let loose and live again. It's creepy to the materialists, but I see it as his own emotional system communicating his real feelings using imagery he'll trust to be truthful and safe.

You're getting a good, happy-results holiday story and a nicely smexy package it's wrapped inside, with most all Keira Andrews stories. This one is a good example of a shorter-than optimal version.

JAWBONE, making deities out of desperation in MeanGirlLand

JAWBONE
MÓNICA OJEDA (tr. Sarah Booker)
Coffee House Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Long-listed for the 2022 National Book Award for Literature in Translation!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise?

When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality.

Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from from Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft, and anonymous “creepypastas,” Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: White. Menacing, toothy, bony white. You'll need to recalibrate your horror-meter away from the endless dark.

I think many people are a little skittish about reading books that have truly, deeply dysfunctional women and girls as the predators as well as prey in a "human is wolf to human" tale. It seems to skeeve the Sanctity of Motherhood crowd the most, which is predictable and unsurprising. What it isn't is realistic. The three characters in this English-language debut horror/psychological thriller-adjacent story are actors in psychodramas they both inherited and participated in perpetuating...they are not, not one of them, victims.

I'd give Author Ojeda a gold medal for that, if I had one. I am mortally sick of sending women and girls the unending message that if uterus, then victim is a) immutable fact 2) a good dodge to avoid personal responsibility and accountability and iii) a necessary precondition to discovering one's agency. Anna/Annelise is, plain and simple, a stunningly effective manipulator. She is absolutely in control of her fate. She orchestrates everything around her to suit a narrative she builds, changes, improves to get more of the oxygen she craves: Attention. Fernanda, oh the poor thing I can hear readers thinking, is totally tuned in to her needs: she seeks extremes, she wants to defy and thus define her limits. And when we meet her, she is at last smashed against the hard limit of being immobilized. Fernanda, deeply and darkly aware of her young body's power to seduce, reward, pleasure her victims in motion and action, is never more completely the center of her captor's world than when she is rendered incapable of movement.

But Miss Clara, the nominal adult whose tenuous leash on her id has snapped, the possessor of power over her students as their guardian and cicerone, is utterly unable to exercise even a shadow of that power because she is so cracked and broken by her past. Her charges, like those things that prosecutors level at malefactors, like those vessels of energy that impart their essential power to a needy receptacle for it, are charged with the true nature of the quest in this polyphonic Passion Play: Boundaries.

Miss Clara has immobilized Fernanda to remove her from the harm she causes and is caused by Anna. In so doing, she creates the most brazen crucible for Horror among the "innocent" I've read in a solid decade or more. I've read that other reviewers, as well as some critics, conjure the shade of H.P. Lovecraft in describing the affect of this story. There is an element of the eldritch horror miasma inherent in any book entitled Jawbone wherein that word is used without distancing irony. But I myownself think this is horror of the Our Lady of the Flowers ilk, of the Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded strain. The events herein aren't of the explicit-conduct variety. They are sexual, these women, and they are absolutely sure that sexual is what they mean their acts to be, thus Genet; they are psychologically subtle, they are seeking and thirsting for subtler refreshment than just vaginal wetness, thus de Sade.

It is anxiety-crippled Miss Clara's terrible, terrible luck to meet privileged perverted Annelise. The young mistress of domination's most brilliantly subtle expression, the psychic force of the story on the unbalanced, determines to make of her youth a supreme weapon, the myth of purity. The White God she invents and that god's immediate claim on the unwavering attention of all with whom Annelise shares the words, is so carefully inflected that Miss Clara does not see but feels with blinding intensity the repeated reiterated regurgitated violations that broke her to begin with, that made with White no purity but putridity. No nobility and cleanliness and finality of bone. There is only the powder of mold as it rots flesh in wetness. There is the liminal space of menstrual cloth not yet used as a blood-dam. Annelise conjures the cruel capable whiteness of teeth, hardest objects in a body, necessary to rip and mangle the very stuff Humanity must have or simply lose all power and cease. Die. Though perhaps not entirely, if there is will and enough lust to use it.

As an act of Literature, translation is alchemical. Take this gleaming, golden thing, this extant object of crafted and intended meaning, and use the solvents and reagents of a different meaning-regime to produce gold. Again. In Jawbone, Translator Booker explains her kerotakis and its subtle distillates in a note before one reads the novel. I understand that impulse to assist the mainly monoglot US audience. It feels to me, at least, more like a way to emulate Annelise: I will take all the pain, hurt me and make me bleed, that I may give your dark input of uninterest or unwillingness to work for this experience of distillation into a finer, lighter, more potent Enlightenment its ashes and sands, its heats from sources not like the results. Not for this translator the mere bain-marie. Its coddling of like fluids to make of one the best and most palatable form it can take is too bland for this alchemy of hers. No custard of double-boiled entertainment comes from here. It is the hottest ash, the slowest heat exchange of crater-hot sand that takes the already intoxicating vodka into Everclear, into its superlative...but brutally unforgiving of misuse...form.

It is a high-wire act, as I would guess translating Joyce's Ulysses into hieroglyphics would be. Surviving tweaks to reality like multi-hyphenated English terms, which would make a Spanish-speaking ear and eye agog with Otherness, aren't readily apparently Othered. I fully understand and support the editorial decision not to use italics to indicate foreignness. For Spanish. But permaybehaps some of these oddities could be italicized for the Othering of English as it would be in an Ecuadorian ear? As it is, they just stub my reader's toe on their odd height and unyielding hardness.

It can feel, in the course of the read, humid to be in the abandoned spaces and the wildlands. I mean this in a visceral way. The reading of the games that Fernanda enacts, at huge, huge existential risk to Annelise, calls forth actual sweat from my reader's brow. In the stories, the words spun to whip the parties to Dionysian ecstasy and Pan-ic from the god itself work. That is not always to the benefit of Author Ojeda's actual novel. Overall, minding my place as bystander and accomplice but not perpetrator, I can't give the entire reading experience a perfect score because of those very few points where The Story showed herself from behind the obscuring mask.

Make no mistake, though, this is Literature and big, big fun entertainment caught in the slick, wet act of making passion real. Read it without your lady-gloves on. Read it with your speed turned lower than usual but used longer. Read it while you're avoiding something Social, some obligation that couldn't be said no to.

But read it now.

FOUR GAY BDSM THRILLERS, the "Power Exchange" series by A.J. Rose

POWER EXCHANGE
A.J. ROSE (Power Exchange #1)
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the moment Detective Gavin DeGrassi steps into the world of BDSM to solve the brutal slaying of Dom George Kaiser, his course is not his own. Mesmerized by the context in which the victim lived and the images seared into his soul, Gavin has to find a way to navigate these unknown waters. With his personal life in upheaval due to a marital split, and his professional life uncertain with the assignment of a new partner, Gavin needs all the help he can get understanding the case.

Enter Ben Haverson, a psychologist and a well known Dom. With Ben’s help as a consultant on the case and attention to Gavin himself, Gavin delves deeper than he ever thought he would into the world of restraints and paddles. Forced to take a closer look at himself, his true nature, and his innermost desires, Gavin has a choice: keep the fear of submitting at bay, or dive in and solve the case with the knowledge he gains? When another victim is discovered, Gavin’s choice is made for him, and he’s pulled headlong into the deepest, most emotional journey of his life.

Unfortunately for him and Ben, a killer has noticed, has taken stock, and has set his sights on the D/s pair. Can Gavin outwit him, or will his first exchange of power be his last?

My Review: Everything that celebration of abuse and belittlement Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't in terms of the BDSM lifestyle. Realistic depiction of how contracts between Dom and sub work, and how very deep a D/s bond becomes in a very short time. It's amazing what committing to eliminating bullshit and nonsense does for a relationship. The sex is really better than the mystery. Not that I'm complaining. That was one fine cherry-popping, A. J. Rose, mighty mighty fine.

The mystery part wasn't deft. Gavin DeGrassi isn't detecting particularly well, given some very very basic events he seems simply not to have noticed. In fact, I spent more than a few minutes screaming at the frequently dumb as a box of rocks Gary Stu "detective" to act like he earned his badge and didn't simply find it in a box of Cracker Jacks....

I could have lived happily without chapter 13 being *quite* so intense. Going over the top here was skating on a razor's edge of being torture porn. Be aware: This is rape, this is abuse.

I picked up the next three in the series after Gavin's Dom said this:

“Gavin, we're going to grow old together, and whether you pick up a gardening hobby, or learn to make you won sushi, or even decide to learn an instrument, I will be right there with you, growing with you. We'll share our whole lives, our quirks and bad habits. It's not just learning your past and who you are today; its getting to see who you'll become tomorrow. I want to be there for that.”

Really, what more can one ask of a gay-themed series than to have the best of us mirrored in the world that even members of our own community regard with alarm.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SAFEWORD
A.J. ROSE (Power Exchange #2)
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Everywhere Detective Gavin DeGrassi looks he’s reminded of his attack by the Breath Play Killer. It’s in the house he lives in with his partner and Dom, Ben Haverson. It’s in the sympathetic yet pitying looks he receives from his fellow detectives when he returns to the force after a year-long hiatus. It’s in the suffocating coddling of his entire family, and the relentless reporter demanding an exclusive of his ordeal.

Most of all, it’s in his lack of submission to Ben, who isn’t convinced Gavin’s recovered enough to trust the power exchange between them.
The miraculous recovery of two teen boys from a twisted kidnapper gives him heart, and Gavin's determined to prove he can handle anything despite increasing strain between him and Ben, painful nightmares, and panic when anyone touches him.

But his next case is too close for comfort: a friend and colleague found raped and murdered in a fate chillingly similar to what could have been his own, and this killer isn’t stopping with one cop. As the body count rises and taunting souvenirs are being hand-delivered to Gavin, he faces a frustrating lack of leads, a crushing need to prove himself, and a sinking suspicion the imprisoned kidnapper’s reach is further than originally thought. A miasma of uncertainty and fear threaten to suffocate him when he asks a question with which he’s overwhelmingly familiar: what happens when a victim is pushed too far?

My Review: Wow, what a ride. What an amazing adrenaline rush of an ending. What can Rose do to top this one? I'll tell you below.

So, after I found out about Consent, let me revisit this book and explain why it is my personal favorite of the books in the series to date.

The end of Power Exchange was, to put it mildly, a horrific test of the men's strength and commitment. The awfulness of the events that Ben and Gavin endured can't be overstated. The impact of the extreme publicity surrounding the events can't be overstated. These two men were traumatized physically, psychologically, and publicly. In Consent, their violated beings are shown in the process of healing. Their family relationships are shown in all their realistic upheaval and flux. The source of their identity as a couple, Gavin's submission to Ben's Domination of his body and his spirit, is fractured and despite their mutual and deep desire to recover that connection, they aren't able to...but they are not either one vaguely in the mood to give up trying.

Ben loves Gavin, Gavin loves Ben. This is the given point from which this story operates. Nothing that has happened has changed them so much that the facts aren't true. But then there is the other stuff lying between them in huge mounds of rubble and vast slicks of toxic waste. The trust issues that follow in the wake of being raped. The fears of inadequacy in the face of your beloved partner's pain, which you can't fix. The awful moment when your own broken inner self seems to be too much for your partner to handle, so you feel you *should* release them from your further fulfilling your needs.

"You still need someone to take control sometimes, but now giving that control unbalances you. Believe me, I understand. I may not feel exactly the same, but I do understand."

"Do you?" I pulled back to look at him. "Does it bother you that I can't seem to trust anyone, even you?"

–and–

"You are the only one I want, sub or not, fucked in the head or whole. This last year, with you, I've woken up inside. I used to think it was the thrill of the whip, of seeing someone on his knees for me, or the heat of a freshly reddened ass that made me feel alive. Getting someone to fly with me, taking submission for the gift it is--that's a heady thing. It makes my nerves sing and my heart beat fast. Gets me hard and I feel like I can do anything. And that feeling is a pittance compared to being with you."

And then the sense of the thing reasserts itself: NO. NOT A DAMN CHANCE. Ben and Gavin each reach this awful precipice and look into the abyss of aloneness after each man finally discovers himself, his best self, in the other man's eyes. They say no, they grab hold of each other and they move together as far away as they can from that horrible annihilating aloneness.

And they do so while solving a horrible crime and rescuing innocent young men from vile servitude. They don't come out of this case unscathed but they come out changed for the better, is also a great deal sadder.

Far and away the best of the series to date.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

CONSENT
A.J. ROSE
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Cole, what’s wrong?

Former detective Gavin DeGrassi likes his new life and his job as a university professor, molding the minds of the next generation of law enforcement. It keeps him in the field he loves, but out of the media and out of the danger he seems to draw. He’s settled and happy with his partner and Dom, Ben Haverson.

It’s Myah.

Until a middle of the night phone call from his brother, Cole, whose desperation and fear yank him back into the world of criminals and countdowns. Only this time, the stakes are much higher.

She’s missing.

Detective Myah Hayes, Gavin’s sister-in-law and former partner, has a past of her own, one that has returned to claim her. With only their instincts and the help of a rogue CSI, Gavin, Ben, and Cole will do whatever it takes to find Myah, following a flimsy trail of evidence to Chicago, where all is not what it seems—dirty cops, moral pimps, and a nest of snakes who call themselves businessmen.

They’re on a collision course with the worst of humanity, and more than Myah’s life is caught in the vortex. Can they find her, and if they do, will there be anything left to save?

Warning: contains scenes of rape and graphic violence and may not be suitable for sensitive readers. Discretion advised.

My Review: I will keep this short and simple: Author Rose, you have disappointed me. Chapter 25 was unnecessary and prurient, but my disappointment stems from the cheap and shoddy trick it represents on your delighted and dedicated readers. I am most definitely one of them.

I intend this as a compliment: There is no way I would ever have known from the way you wrote Gavin and Ben's relationship what gender you are IRL. On balance I would've expected you to be male, given the startling depth of your characters's physiological responses and the psychology before and behind them. But truly the way you've written the men's characters is simply good writing, something either gender can create if a given level of talent is present.

That makes the sting of being let down so forcefully by the torture porn in chapter 25 so much worse. It made the unpleasant shock of that unnecessary death much less effective as a surprise, a gut-punch, as it was meant to be. And Myah's later torture after the failed escape attempt was also rendered less effective as the horrifying gut-punch it truly was.

Had I edited this book, I would've made the following observation: This number of words would be better spent throughout the book humanizing Ben, Cole, and the elder DeGrassis via phone calls or something.

I will, of course, rush right out to read the fourth entry in this series because the deep and velvety pleasure of seeing myself (idealized, of course) in Ben is too satisfying to deny myself.

"But I’m not through with you, Gavin DeGrassi. I have plans to redden that ass and mark your skin. There are many more orgasms to deny you, and butt plugs to make you wear in public. D-rings I want to add to your corsets, since it’s clear you need restraining again. I haven’t bought our cabin in Colorado for our retirement. We haven’t been to the beach together. I want to go abroad with you. I haven’t picked out the porch swing we’re going to sit on when we’re eighty and yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off our lawn. I want a collar around your throat, and a ring on your left hand. I have plans for us, and I’m going to do everything in my power to see those plans through.”

He's the Dom that many subs crave, and seldom find: The one who loves you and needs to show you that you're his and no one else's. Ben needs Gavin as much as Gavin needs Ben: “I've seen the way you are together. He's your protector, and you're his purpose. He's your glue and you're his art.” That's the best of the D/s world. I need to go back there, and these books do that for me. But I will pick the book up with a heretofore absent wariness.

That hurts like fuck to say.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

RESTRAINT
A.J. ROSE (Power Exchange #4)
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Who brings a Glock on a honeymoon?

Not retired detective Gavin DeGrassi. When his husband Ben asks who he plans to shoot, Gavin has no answer. They’re spending three weeks in Ben’s family cabin near Seattle, not chasing down bad guys. Or are they?

Ben finds evidence the car accident that claimed his parents’ lives more than fifteen years ago was not so accidental. To avenge the Haversons, Gavin dusts off his detective skills and unknowingly paints a target on their backs. Suddenly, Ben is the prime suspect in a crime and the message couldn’t be clearer: drop the investigation or suffer untold consequences.

Gavin will stop at nothing to ensure Ben’s safety and bring the Haversons’ killers to justice, but without help, they’re sitting ducks. Gavin must make unlikely allies in his quest to clear Ben’s name and stop a ruthless crime syndicate. But with his loyalties divided, how far is too far in his quest for justice?

My Review: One entire star off for twelve (12) instances of the w-verb. Seriously. Using any out-of-the-ordinary word twelve times in your book should be a red flag for an author. What am I shorthanding here? Why does this particular word need to be in my book this many times? Y'all'd agree with me if it was "coddiwomple" or "absquatulate" you know you would. "Wink" *shudder* is just as uncommon a word in every other branch of fiction writing beyond MM romance.

Anyway.

The story here is what happens when Ben, our Dom, goes back to his childhood summer home with Gavin, his sub, to celebrate their honeymoon. It's a delightful idea, the men going to gorgeous Seattle for some smexytimes; but this isn't to be. The smexytimes are really not the point. And that's a wonderful thing.

Seriously! It is!

The relationship between partners in a D/s situation matures with the parties involved as it does in all long-term relationships. With that maturity comes the change of sex life. Not lessening. Not death. Just change. In Ben and Gavin's relationship, their routinizing of D/s doesn't require them to compulsively repeat the same acts. They move deeper into each others' cores and negotiate the introduction of far more intimate and demanding behaviors. It is very much one of my pleasures in reading this series to enjoy this evolution of the characters' interactions.

Feelings of disquiet, anger, or aggressiveness, he considered big weaknesses in a Dom and particularly in himself. Funny opinion for a psychologist to have, but we’d been through this in therapy.
–and–
I leaned into his warmth, my heart fluttering against my ribcage like a murder of crows taking flight.

Being a series novel, there are cameos by characters we've met before; the fact that the entire DeGrassi clan is having Thanksgiving back in St. Louis without the men is played off well. And Gavin's call to a St. Louis source for some crucial help is answered, despite the risk to his helper.

“Why are you letting Gavin fight your battles for you? Can’t bring yourself to do it alone? It’s clear he has a brain, but he’s so blinded by devotion to you that he, a retired detective, is turning criminal to do your bidding, to set your mind at ease about Mommy and Daddy’s deaths. They’re dead. This revenge, or whatever you’re trying to accomplish, won’t bring them back. But you have a living, breathing, committed man by your side, and you’re apparently fine if he goes to prison for you. That’s fucked up.”

I like the honesty I see about D/s relationships in the series. It's hard for Ben to give up control; it's hard for him to feel helpless or actually useless in any situation where his earthly treasure, Gavin, is threatened. Every good Dom knows that horrible reality and, if we're at all honest, the creeping fear that our treasured sub will realize "hey! I don't need him after all!" and walk away. Ah, the joys of anxiety! All humans suffer from it. And so very few of us do the simple, smart thing and open up to our most trusted, most beloved partners. How very much pain would be mitigated or even disappeared by this simple, monumental, impossible act!

But such are the musings of one with no dog in this fight anymore. In common with all readers, I use books to teach me the truths I refused to accept from reality. Reading all four books in this series makes me long for a second chance to be young...as do all the other books I read. A joyous ache, a happy poignance, a learnèd innocence. How I pity those who aren't fellow addicts.

PRINCE'S GAMBIT, second THE CAPTIVE PRINCE novel, still trigger-laden but DAAA-YUM

PRINCE'S GAMBIT
C.S. PACAT (Captive Prince #2)
Berkley Books
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: With their countries on the brink of war, Damen and his new master, Prince Laurent, must exchange the intrigues of the palace for the sweeping might of the battlefield as they travel to the border to avert a lethal plot.

Forced to hide his identity, Damen finds himself increasingly drawn to the dangerous, charismatic Laurent. But as the fledgling trust between the two men deepens, the truth of secrets from both their pasts is poised to deal them the crowning death blow…

My Review: Still hot, still transgressive, still replete with vocabulary words. All the boxes ticked on your play-at-home scorecard? Good. You're getting what you've paid for already.

But you're also getting an enriched reading experience. The reality level of the intrigues and plots is enhanced; the twists and turns of royal morality are even more starkly limned; and jeebus goddlemitey damn the SEX! The STAKES! The brain-bending HOT SEX! (Wait, did I say that before? So what it needs saying again. And again.)

Wherever this nice straight lady got her wildly gay imagination from, it's on full display here; but so is her scheming Machiavellian side, and her much-better-hidden hearts&flowers romantical side. That they're all given to both of the main characters as well is a major coup. Mechanical sex gets dull. Twisty turny intrigue without any personal, passionate stakes starts dull. No sin goes unrewarded in this series! Makes for a propulsive, addictive read.

I renew my call to Nick Jonas's people: Get these rights and make your man a superstar by making a faithful adaptation of the series. His Prince Damianos/Damen the sex-slave would win him a shelf full of hardware from the Industry.