Review of modern romance How to Find a Princess by Alyssa Cole, and a holiday gift for you

 

When I reviewed Alyssa Cole's book How to Catch a Queen I complained that the heroine was way too good for the manchild hero.  How to Find a Princess,  Cole's next book in her Runaway Royals series, features love interests who are much better matched.  In fact, one of the most interesting features of this book is that Makeda and Beznaria are very similar to each other in their strengths, which are also their weaknesses.  They both love to help others -- to they extent that they both like to force their help on people who don't want it.  Cole could have gone farther in exploring what it was like for each of them to confront someone whose annoying traits are exactly the same as their own annoying traits.  

The issue of the similarity of the characters made the love story somewhat unbelievable to me. I subscribe to the rule that you tend to be put off by people who are most similar to you.  (I know I am.  If you're an ultra-organized over-achieving introvert who loves to write smut about naked sex slaves, sorry, we are probably not a match.) 

Cole did a great job with Makeda as an adult child of an alcoholic/mentally unstable mother, and exploring the reasons that she always needs to be in charge and be helpful.  It was a joy to see Beznaria being nice to her, and Makeda learning to accept someone being nice to her.  Beznaria is not as well developed a character, although I did like how her internal experience as a person with attention deficit disorder was described, and how having ADD was a strength not a weakness.

SPOILERS HERE, FOR HOW TO FIND A PRINCESS AND GAME OF THRONES:  

My main issue with How to Find a Princess is that the last three pages should have been twenty pages, at least.  I believe it ended with Makeda and Beznaria being cousins, but it wasn't entirely clear.  If so, ick, and will that lead to a Jon Snow/Daenerys Targaryan Game of Thrones-like issue?  

One other thing about Cole as a writer: she's hilarious, and I would love to see her lean in to her comic genius.  My favorite line in the book: "Algernon Shropsbottomshireburrough, pronounced Smith, was both."  

A GIFT FOR MY READERS:

Today is Thursday, December 16, 2021.  For the next four days my smutty, dark dystopian novel about naked sex slaves, Mindgames, is free on Kindle.  If you love dark erotica that has a well-written plot and actual character development, this book is for you. 

RIP Anne Rice, the godmother of naked sex slave smut

The obituaries of Anne Rice uniformly remember her as the author of the Vampire novels.  The few that mention that she also wrote erotica do so only as an afterthought.   

But for me, Rice will always be the author who wrote unabashedly delightful novels about naked sex slaves.

 

Her Sleeping Beauty Trilogy, written under the pen name A.N. Roquelaire, was so hot that when I innocently picked up The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty in the Barnes & Noble where I spent most of my lunch breaks at the time (the early 1990's) and started thumbing through it, I literally dropped it on the floor. 

The trilogy reimagines Sleeping Beauty as a naked sex slave in a kingdom of naked sex slaves. It is slight of plot and characterization, but  oh so pretty.  Beauty is a sweet, innocent masochist who is turned on by humiliation, and by being spanked, and by sultry stories her friends tell her of being anally penetrated by a carrot.  Beauty stands for all of us. 

(Rice published a fourth book in the series, Beauty's Kingdom, in 2016.  It had none of the courage of the first three books, and is overall a plodding, politically correct read.) 

 

Rice also wrote a novel called Exit to Eden, under the pen name Anne Rampling.  A cover blurb on a recent edition of the book sums it up:  "They will explore their most forbidden desires, including love." 

At first glance Exit to Eden is similar to the Sleeping Beauty books. It is set on a sex island.  Some people volunteer to be naked slaves.  Other people pay to dominate them.  It has some scenes that could be set in Beauty's kingdom.  But despite that, it doesn't have much explicit sex in it.  It is less erotica and more love story, and a great one at that, in which two people who happen to be kinky learn to be their full selves through their love of the other.

(The book was made into an almost universally panned movie adaptation, which added Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Akroyd as undercover cops who infiltrate the sex island to chase a MacGuffin. My favorite part:  A hot slave keeps following Rosie O'Donnell around, begging her to use him.  When he asks her one too many times how he can fulfill her fantasies, she says in exasperation, "Go paint my house."  And he does!  He's actually a rich investment banker!  Now that's a love story.) 

The Beauty books and Exit to Eden were a huge inspiration for Mindgames, my own much darker novel about naked sex slaves.  Beauty showed me that it's possible to create a novel that expresses your deepest sexual fantasies, and Exit to Eden demonstrated that such a novel can be well-written and have a strong plot and deep character development.  For that I will always be grateful to Rice.

Rest in peace.

My review of chicklit book The Perfect Find by Tia Williams (with some self-promotion at the end)

 

A shallow description of The Perfect Find by Tia Williams makes it sound like a generic chicklit book.  Woman with a glamorous career in New York City falls for a hottie, issues ensue, she reevaluates her life choices, and comes out stronger and better.

But The Perfect Find is chicklit at the top of its game.  The romance in the book is between Jenna Jones, a woman in her late 30's whose biological clock is ticking like a timebomb, and Eric Combs, a man in his early 20's who needs to spend the next several years of his life focusing on making a career as a film director.  Usually I would hate a story like that, because it's obvious that there's no way it can, or should, work out between the two of them.  But I really enjoyed how Williams did not cheat with her characters or cut corners with the conflict.  Jenna and Eric are at different stages in life, and those stages are incompatible with each other.  Rather than being annoyed by this, I found myself genuinely curious throughout the book how they would make it work.  Let's just say the ending didn't cheat either.  

I did have my usual nitpicks.  The villain of the story is Eric's mother -- who he, a grown man, lives with, and lives off of in significant ways, all the while believing that she is evil.  That was a character flaw that was never addressed.  He should have gotten a cheap apartment with roommates like every other ambitious, broke young person who can't stand their mother instead of using her and complaining about her. 

And--GIANT SPOILER HERE:

 

 

 

Jenna should not have had and raised Eric's child without telling him.  It's a testament to Williams' talent as a writer that when I read this part of the story my first reaction wasn't complete disgust.  Williams had set up these characters and their situations so well that it just seemed like the right thing to do.  But my second reaction, when I stepped back from the book, was absolute dismay.  That kind of behavior is just not okay, even if you are convinced that you know what is right for the father of your child -- even if you actually know what is right for him.   Even if the father of your child agrees with you when he learns the truth.  Just don't do it.

And now onto something completely different:  I'm not sure if I can call it shameless self-promotion if I'm giving away my books for free.  Today is Sunday, December 5, 2021.  It's the last day that you can get a free kindle copy of my smutty short story, My First Submissive Adventure.  The blurb:  

Ginny is newly divorced and anxious to explore her submissive side. But does Tom have what it takes to get inside her defenses?

Consider this my gift to you.  If you like it, and you want to return the favor, please consider telling your friends about it.  Or writing a review.  Or take a look at my new book, The Mature Woman's Guild to Desire, which includes My First Submissive Adventure and three other smutty short stories.  Or at Mindgames, my dark dystopian novel about naked sex slaves. 

My review of Netflix romance movie A Castle for Christmas, but mostly musings on my admiration for Brooke Shields

 

 Brooke Shields and I the same age.  Which is to say, much like the kid in my grade who lived around the corner from me when I  was growing up but I was never friends with, she was always there, part of the warp and weave of my life, but also (like any celebrity to a commoner) utterly unknown to me in any real way.

There is no equivalent to Brooke Shields in my kids' generation.  She was a child star, but not a Disney or Nickelodeon star.  In her first big movie, Pretty Baby, she played a child prostitute and as a 12 year old girl did her own fully nude scenes.  This was a serious movie, directed by serious director Louis Malle and starring Susan Sarandon.  For some reason the adults in Shields' life, including her mother, had no problem with the movie.  For some reason I was able to watch an unedited version on mainstream TV.

Shields never took a detour into screechy, muggy roles.  The closest she came was a fairly silly movie she made with George Burns, whose plot I don't recall.  And then there was The Blue Lagoon, which sounds like a Disney kid movie but really wasn't.  She played a teenage girl who had been shipwrecked on an island with a very cute teenage boy since they were children.  Shields used a body double for the nude scenes in this role.  My father hated this movie.  "They never would have developed language skills like that!"  "They never would have figured out sex on their own!"  

Around that time there were the infamous Calvin Klein underwear ads.  A semi-nude mid-teen Shields arched her back on a giant poster in Times Square, with the caption, "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins."  

When Shields applied to Princeton there were rumors that her application was on the precondition that she would be accepted.  I don't know if that's true.  I do know that I happened to be visiting a friend at Princeton on the weekend that admissions letters went out, and that a movie society there aired a screening of Endless Love, a thriller that she starred in.  My friend and I went, and gossiped about how many changes of outfits she brought when she visited campus.  We didn't give much thought to what it would be like for Shields, the actual incoming freshman, to arrive at campus with the hope of just being a student. 

Shields did attend Princeton, where she immediately bragged about getting straight As before any grades had come out, and wrote (or "wrote") a memoir proclaiming her virginity.  Much like Emma Watson a generation later at Brown University, she complained to magazines that no one would speak to her because they didn't want her to think they were only talking to her because of who she was.

I have no idea what kind of student Shields the real person was.  But I do know that as she continued on in life she became . . . awesome.  It's possible that she always was, of course.  As an adult she said that one of her biggest regrets was waiting too long to have sex.  (Me too, sister.)  She reinvented herself in sitcom land, starting with a guest spot on Friends and then in her own middling show, Suddenly Susan.  She spoke publicly about suffering from post-partum depression, and blasted back at Tom Cruise, her Endless Love costar, for belittling her for it.  Then she spoke publicly about caring for her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease.  

Which brings us to the new Netflix movie, A Castle for Christmas, which Shields starred in and has a producers credit for.  In some ways it's a generic romance:  American woman takes a trip to Scotland, makes friends with strong accents, falls for a duke, and throws a Christmas party.

But, like Shields, parts of the movie are awesome, including:

*    Brooks' character, Sophie, is a bestselling romance novelist at least some of whose books have titles similar to Judith Krantz novels (another throwback to the generation Shields and I belong to).  She is successful enough to have become filthy rich -- filthy rich enough to buy a castle.  Yay for romance writers!

*    To the extent that the movie has any conflict, it's over whether Sophie should be able to control what she writes.  Can she kill off a popular character just because she wants to?  Can she get away from the series that has made her rich and famous, against her publisher's wishes? It's the beginning of an interesting conversation. 

*   The Scottish village where Sophie finds herself seems to be entirely devoid of children.  Except for Sophie, who has a daughter in college, none of the characters appear to have kids.  They were not missed.  I wonder if Shields used her power to keep children actors out of the movie -- and out of at least one opportunity to be exploited as child stars.  If she did, more power to her.  

*  The movie is a love story about people in their fifties who never say, "We're so old, maybe too old to have sex, maybe sex at our age is gross, I look old, I feel old."  It was just a regular love story, with characters who are my age.  Yay!  (Although the  movie is 100 percent clean, with nothing more than a few chaste kisses on screen, I will nevertheless plug my new book of erotic short stories about people my age having good sex, The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire.)

*  The movie had me grinning all the way through.  Some of it had to to with the plot, and the characters, and the scenery.  A lot of it had to do with fun radiating off of Shields.  She seemed to be really enjoying herself, and that made me happy.

I do have a few nitpicks (of course, because I'm me):

*  This is just personal preference, but when I entered the dating world after my divorce I had a few rules for who I would swipe right on on dating apps.  No one who owns a boat -- that's a sign that they have too much free time and therefore would expect too much of my time.  No one who smokes, because ugh, my marriage was ash, I'm not interested in dating someone who tastes like ash.  And no one who never had kids (their own, step, foster, whatever, I don't care, as long as they helped raise them), because anyone who has not had to take children into account when choosing a job, choosing health insurance, deciding what to have for dinner for years on end, trying to figure out whether it's safe to buy tickets for an event more than three hours in the future, can't possibly understand what my life has been like.  So I don't entirely like the romance between Sophie and the childless Duke.  

*    Spoiler on this one:

Sophie's daughter skips her dad's wedding to come to Sophie's Christmas party.  This is the Duke's Christmas present to Sophie.  It is not okay. The daughter should go to the dad's wedding.  If the Duke had children of his own,  he would understand that sometimes kids have to choose one parent's more important event over a party the other parent throws, even if they don't want to, and it's the job of the other parent -- and their lover -- to support them in that.  

 Nitpicks aside, this is is a lovely holiday movie starring a lovely person.  More power to both of them.  

 

Note from Jasmine Gold: As the name of this blog indicates, I write erotica. Check out my dark, dystopian novel about naked sex slaves, Mindgames. Your darkest fantasies, with a phenomenal plot and characters you will come to think of as beloved friends. Available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited  and in paperback.  Or read my book of short stories about hot, consensual sex, The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire, available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.

I have a new book of smutty short stories out! "The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire"

 

If you only know my writing from Mindgames, The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire might be a bit of a surprise.  No naked sex slaves, fully consensual sex -- but of course still kinky.  

Here's the blurb:

Great sex with hot partners who treat them well. In these short stories women move past divorce, the burdens of single motherhood, financial concerns, and self-doubt to the realization that they are worthy of having their sexual fantasies fulfilled. All they have to do is say yes.

Speaking of saying yes, the holidays are coming up.  Say yes to yourself.  Get yourself a present that you know you will really enjoy.  Nothing beats the gift of erotica.  Buy my book.  You know you want to! 

Review of charming, brand new Regency romance The Perks of Loving a Wallflower by Erica Ridley

 Mild spoilers in this review.

The Perks of Loving a Wallflower by Erica Ridley is utterly charming, and a must-read for anyone who loves well-written Regency romances. (If you read a lot of my reviews, I'm pleased to report that this book just came out.  It's not one of my thrift store finds.  In fact, I pre-ordered and paid full price for it.  Support authors, y'all.) 

The first main character of the book is Philippa, whose situation is the standard Regency trope of wallflower whose unloving parents want her to marry a lord (pretty much any lord) to further her father's political career.  Philippa wants to be a dutiful daughter but finds men generally uninteresting and the objects of her parents' ambition specifically loathsome.

The second main character is Tommy, who in today's vocabulary might call themself genderfluid or nonbinary.  When first explaining to Philippa, Tommy says, "Sometimes I'm more like a man, and sometimes I'm  more like a woman, but mostly I feel like . . . both. And neither."  As the book progresses, Tommy becomes frustrated with wordy explanations and says they're just Tommy.  

Tommy comes from an Umbrella Academy-like family of motley orphans adopted together. They don't exactly have superpowers but it's pretty close, with each sibling having trained in a skill set -- disguises, climbing walls, integrating scads of information, etc. -- to an uncanny level.  Unlike in The Umbrella Academy they're nice, and nice to each other, and there's no incest.  

I was worried when I began reading The Perks of Loving a Wallflower that this was going to be a dreadful book in which Tommy first appears to Philippa as a man with an assumed identity and puts off revealing who they really are out of fear of not being accepted, with annoying hijinks to hide the deceit, a reveal from which the relationship is saved only by a kidnapping or life-threatening illness, and general unpleasantness ensuing.  

I am pleased to say that none of that happened.  Tommy revealed their true identity at the first opportunity.  Philippa was fine with it.  The conflict of the story is whether Philippa will be an obedient daughter to parents who don't deserve her loyalty, or be true to herself.  

This book is at times so funny that I burst out laughing.  It is always sweet.  If I have one criticism, it's that the MacGuffin made little sense -- but that's the nature of MacGuffins.  

If it's not clear, I  highly recommend this book. 

Note from Jasmine Gold: As the name of this blog indicates, I write erotica. Check out my dark, dystopian novel about naked sex slaves, Mindgames. Your darkest fantasies, with a phenomenal plot and characters you will come to think of as beloved friends. Available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited  and in paperback.  Or read my book of short stories about hot, consensual sex, The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire, available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.

My review of The Starter Wife, a truly terrible trashy novel from 2005

 

 

Spoilers in this review

About halfway through my thrift shop purchase of The Starter Wife by Gigi Levangie Grazer I realized I had read it before -- unless there were two novels where the ex-husband dates Britney Spears.  I recalled that even when I first read the novel around the time it came out in 2005 I thought that it was utterly in poor taste to bring Britney -- who by that time was clearly and publicly very troubled -- into this.

Nothing else about the book was familiar as I re-read it.  Not the confusion I felt in the opening chapter about whether I was supposed to like the main character, Gracie, or if she was an anti-hero.  In the first half of the chapter she's at a party, unhappy because the women she's hanging out with there are judging other people by their looks.  In the second half she has an internal monologue devoted to . . . judging other people by their looks.

Gracie continues to be an enigma wrapped up in an idiot.  She is at the end of a marriage that had no reason to start, except that her husband was rich and once bought her a nice meal.  Throughout the book she has nothing kind to say about him, no indication that she ever had any real feelings for him, no mention that the relationship added anything to her life except for a daughter who spends most of the book napping.

Of course Gracie has a gay bff.  And a couple of other friends with no discernible characteristics.  One has kids and one drinks.  Or are they the same person?  

And then . . . enter the well-groomed, healthy, kind, smart, handsome homeless person with no substance abuse or mental health issues.  (Spoiler: he's also super rich.)  They have one night of sex and then move in together.  The end.  

Sigh.

Note from Jasmine Gold: As the name of this blog indicates, I write erotica. Check out my dark, dystopian novel about naked sex slaves, Mindgames. Your darkest fantasies, with a phenomenal plot and characters you will come to think of as beloved friends. Available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited  and in paperback.  Or read my book of short stories about hot, consensual sex, The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire, available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.