Delightfully salacious tales that showcase a series of fetishes.
People overcome sexual oppression in titillating fashion in this collection of erotica set in the late 19th century.
It’s 1878 in Paris in the opening short story, “A Neighboring Hand.” American Camellia Zimmerfield reunites with her friend Suzette Billaud, who champions the rights of women to say and do what they want. That includes in the bedroom, and Camellia’s newfound openness gives sex with her affluent husband a much-needed jolt. This paves the way for the subsequent nine tales, all set about the same time in countries around the world. Characters like Camellia discover exhilarating fetishes or revel in the ones they’ve long harbored. For example, in “Horsing Around,” Qahhar finds inner strength when his neighbor, a horse breeder’s nurse, coaxes him into expressing himself like a constrained stallion. Similarly, an English duke in “How Do You Do Your Do” confesses what he fancies to a woman in the Swiss Alps—“I like hair,” he whispers to her, whether he’s touching it, cutting it, or just talking about it. Anonymous explores a vast array of genuine fetishes that arouse the cast, from rubber balloons and tickling to a bout of electrotherapy. Not all of it is likely to suit every reader’s taste, especially some of the harsher acts, such as a widow receiving a spanking that leaves her bottom “cherry red” and a duchess in London humiliating her servant. Still, there’s no question that they’re all consenting adults, many who demand that lovers treat them in a particular way or willingly submit (for example, France is the safe word for the widow being spanked). Moreover, the stories often end with a surprising touch of romance; some dalliances lead to marriage or, in the Zimmerfields’ case, a reaffirmation of love. The author writes explicit sex scenes that electrify and never bore even as a few tales involve not much beyond discussing and then fulfilling sexual needs.
Delightfully salacious tales that showcase a series of fetishes.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64937-199-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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