I don’t know what is more scary. That I just read an erotic fiction book, that I really enjoyed it, or that I didn’t think there was all that much sex in it. The Freya Press website purports to be a purveyor of ‘Female Erotica’. I know I’m not the target audience for this kind of fiction, but I really don’t see why other men wouldn’t enjoy this story. OK, I guess reading erotica as a man can result in embarrassing tenting, but as it is under 50k words it is easily read in a weekend.
The sexy stuff – I found all of the sex scenes to be believable both in terms of anatomy and of how things can actually happen (from what I can remember anyway). I found the oral sex descriptions particularly vivid and easy to visualize (I’m worrying myself here). Most importantly there were no scenes of a male forcing themselves on a woman and her wanting it. In this book the sex is not only fully consenting, but the female lead is nearly as aggressive as the male. This worked really well for me.
The important stuff – The story was a lot better than I’d expected. I thought that the plot was going to be a thinly veiled vehicle to transport the reader between sex scenes. I was pleasantly surprised. The story was engaging and progressive. Rather than being a story and the sex scenes it felt more like a story that was enhanced by the passion portrayed through the sex scenes. I found myself wanting to find out when the second part is released almost as soon as I finished it. That is just about the highest complement I can give to a book.
What’s the book about though? Werewolves, love, lust and the fight for territory and morality. This isn’t a sanitized teenage friendly version of lycanthropy or a 1980s over the top Hollywood version. This is a more down to earth and gritty story about the loneliness of being a single person well in to adulthood and how a powerful bond of attraction can completely change your life forever. The main male character Joe is the kind of man that all men want to be and all women want to have. The picture on the front cover gives you a pretty shrewd idea about how well he’s built.
I can’t really compare this to any other books in the genre as the last time I read anything close to erotica was the Jilly Cooper Riders series over twenty years ago. I will say that it works as a story and is well worth a read.
Tony's Thoughts 