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ROXANNE

WHO LED HER LOVERS TO THE GATES OF PARADISE AND HER PEOPLE TO THE SUNNY UPLANDS

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

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THE STORY OF HONG GILDONG

If you read only one book about Korean heroic outlaws this season, this should be the one.

The famed saga of Korea’s bandit prince comes in for a new translation, if one that’s not quite idiomatic.

“Kick me with full force, so that I may know your strength.” Not exactly the sort of thing that one would cry out in the midst of some emotional moment, not exactly the most memorable of challenges. Yet, the statement and its rejoinder—“But after you kicked me I could feel my organs vibrate and my body shiver, so I know that you are a man of tremendous power”—alert us that we are in the Land of Translation, a place lots of readers associate with mustiness, fustiness, and all-around yawns. The most exciting of Hong Gildong’s adventures come to us in a chrome of not-quite-English. In fairness, he has many of them.The anonymous early modern epic celebrates the deeds of a lowborn lad, the son of a concubine, whose abilities—“He needed to hear only one thing to understand ten, and learning ten things allowed him to master a hundred”—did not go unremarked in court but naturally excited intrigue and jealousy. What’s a good prince to do? Go off and battle for truth, justice, and the Korean way, of course, taking up cause with the merry bandits of the Taebaek Mountains, robbing from the rich to give to the poor, and doing suchlike things that would meet with the approval of a checklist-wielding Joseph Campbell: liminality, check. Near-death experience, check. Students of comparative mythology will be interested to see how bits of other literatures (especially Arthurian) turn up in Hong Gildong’s story. The introduction might have made more of this lineage and discussed in more detail how modern Korean writers make use of the story in their work, but it does a competent job overall of placing the book in the context of Korean literature.

If you read only one book about Korean heroic outlaws this season, this should be the one.

Pub Date: March 15, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-14-310769-9

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Penguin

Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016

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YESTERDAY

Paralyzingly prolific romancer Michaels has her ups and downs, from the total nonsense of Finders Keepers (1998) to the exemplary plotting of Celebration (p. 103), in which a wealthy woman’s husband flees with her bank account after a 20-year marriage, only to return years later with a sob story but minus the eight million he ran off with. This latest finds the author working in her wildly unlikely mode, with a big mix of mind-bending plot turns. Callie Parker has been raised on a South Carolina plantation by her wealthy father, Clemson. During her childhood and adolescence, Dad and Mama Pearl helped Callie gather three close friends to bond with: the illegitimate orphan Bode Jessup, a kind of brother and idol for Callie; Brie Canfield, whose heart leaps when Clemson takes her in as Callie’s playmate; and Sela Bronson, a poor girl famished for love and grateful for every attention from the Parker family. Comes the day of Callie’s wedding to supremely wealthy Wyn Archer, promising a future afloat on every possible luxury. But the night before the ceremony, an auto accident caused by Wyn’s careless driving puts Callie into a coma—and from the vortex of the coma will rise many “family” secrets of parentage involving the bride-to-be and her friends. Bubble upon breaking bubble as the suds pop. Strictly for the fans.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999

ISBN: 1-57566-467-4

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Kensington

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000

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