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 dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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