by E. N. Stewart ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 24, 2012
An afternoon’s delight for devotees of the kinky, but others might hope for more to wrap their minds around.
This erotic novel traces a woman’s ascendancy to the leadership of a Balkan country, a feat accomplished and accompanied by frequent sexual escapades.
First-time author Stewart relates the lubricious, sometimes scatological tale of Roxanne, a woman whose father, the deposed king of an Eastern European country, has ended up in England after her mother died in unspecified “upheavals” in their former homeland. Undeterred, Roxanne makes her way back as an adult, gradually gaining power, often by getting it on with various men and women in and out of her office. “I’ve done a lot of strategic fucking to get here,” she says, though it’s not all work and no play; she clearly enjoys sex. As she notes after knocking off the president, who dies of a heart attack in bed with her, “Fucking presidents to death must agree with me.” Highlighted by nonstop sex, her subsequent tenure in the executive suite makes Bill Clinton look like a prude. The author gives graphic, blow-by-blow descriptions that border on the clinical of encounters between men and women, women and women, and wilder X-rated happenings. Indeed, though a novel, this book could serve as a useful primer for budding cunnilinguists and as an addendum to the Kama Sutra. Unfortunately, without much interest beyond the bedroom, the plot is too thin to hold the novel together. Though Stewart occasionally tries to sandwich some political philosophy in between the sex sessions, the thoughts on monarchy and democracy are far from profound and are sometimes incomprehensible. Usually competent, the writing stumbles at times, as when a character is “as proud as punch” to have brought a lover to orgasm. For the most part, characters display few attributes besides lascivious ones, so they tend to come off more as mechanical meat puppets than flesh-and-blood humans. Eventually, after so much sex, the novel’s strong suit—its frank approach to and presentation of sex—turns into a weakness: Reading sex scene after sex scene becomes too routine to draw much excitement.
An afternoon’s delight for devotees of the kinky, but others might hope for more to wrap their minds around.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477223284
Page Count: 148
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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