Entertaining, energized accounts of sex romps with real literary flair.
In this steamy set of interconnected erotic tales, a pair of high heels passes from one woman to another, catalyzing wild sexual adventures.
The story begins in 1952, as Italian footwear designer Paolo DeLuca crafts a pair of superlatively sexy pumps, dubbed la Rampa, for the express purpose of inducing more wiggle in his new girlfriend’s walk. She’s offended when he presents them to her in church, but her mother, Maria Fallarino, finds them fetching and takes Paolo up to the bell tower for oral sex. Paolo’s shoe line conquers the world, but the original pair of shoes embarks on a picaresque journey across decades and continents, provoking each new owner into scandalous misbehavior. Hollywood actor Temple Holliday wears them in an iconic 1960s film scene and then to the Oscar ceremony, where she performs oral sex on a male nominee when the lights go down. Subsequent owners include a North Carolina restaurant worker who, in 1976, has an encounter with a handsome drifter; a lesbian punk rocker in the 1980s who wears them during a session of noisy oral sex that’s recorded and turned into a hit single; and a lap dancer in the 1990s who uses them to stimulate a customer who turns out to be a private detective hired by Paolo to recover the shoes. Most of the book tells the story of Andie Warner, a New York City architect who buys the shoes from a vintage clothing store in 2019 for a Temple Holliday party costume. The 49-year-old is so compelling in the shoes that she attracts the amorous attention of 20-something Trey Maas; their flirting sparks an affair that goes way beyond oral sex, encouraged by her husband.
Beauchamp’s episodic yarns master the classic erotica recipe for success, deftly combining a sense of artiness with tawdriness: “Maria’s ass in black lace slowly rose into view like the harvest moon climbing above Superga, wrapped in ornate vines and whorls of ebony silk.” Some readers will like the tales’ smoldering, well-paced narrative buildups, flirty banter, and obsessive attention to fashion, although the latter occasionally gets a bit too obsessive, and it has a tendency to get a bit bogged down in technical details: “Then the stockings would be glass ironed, dyed, and finally stretched over a leg form and then set with steam by a Heliot steamer.” Others will enjoy the shamelessly lascivious characters, graphic sexual descriptions, and foot fetishism. Over the course of the book, Beauchamp’s richly textured prose is punchy and evocative (“She emerges, swinging open wide the door with a swerve from her hip, and rounds the counter like a MiG-21 banking around the Mây Tào Mountains”), and it’s fully stocked with sharply etched characters that feel like actual people and don’t come across as simply glossy pinups. The end result is a work of crackerjack couples erotica with writing so good that readers won’t be in a hurry to skim along to the next big sex scene.
Entertaining, energized accounts of sex romps with real literary flair.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-95-373550-8
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Melange Books, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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