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| Book Cover via Amazon.com |
Opinion
Leon Mauvais contacted me via my blog to ask for a review, and I’m happy he did, and really appreciated when he sent me a mobi copy of his book. On Twitter I have recently discovered that some of the erotica writing community is under the impression, I do not review erotica. Well, I do too. I’ve done it in the past such as with Sorcha Rowen’s stories, and Leon asked me to review his book which is most assuredly erotica. As with all honest reviews, this is my opinion so sit back kids this one is not my normal fare. “Sugar Plum’d” is an erotica short story is not something I’d normally pick up for myself, but it did expand my ideas on the story and thought. It has a holiday theme to it, so it’s perfect for those naughty little winter nights.
We follow the adventures of Pembroke. Pembroke is a shifter reindeer, and I may add, he’s an interesting character. He has a character arc of discovering which in time explains to him why he’s doing what he has been doing, and over this discover Pembrook struggles with his childhood misunderstanding of the current world. You see my friends, where Pembrook lives there is a literal war on Christmas going on, and Pembroke is part of the struggle. Without getting into spoilers, we can say on both sides, elves and reindeer, are all mean and terrible. The story is fueled tension and intrigue with very erotic moments, and some drug use for the changers or shifters that are given. There’s an interesting part where there one of many is a very detailed erotic scene in it, but this scene is unique also information is being passed between the participants that move the plot and also establishes a drug-induced vision. I can’t really divulge more than that, mostly because it spoils the book, but I can say that there is some art to it. I just point this scene out because I’ve never encountered an erotica detailed action sequence that moved the plot in such a way before.
Now for a couple of criticisms. The first being, there isn’t clear and obvious progression changes until the 70% mark of the book. Without some kind of signal the book goes from a chase to sex to more action, then more sex and there is a back and forth to the structure until around the 70% mark. Then it becomes more paced and the tension makes a lot more sense. That’s a slight bit of a problem with the structure. It’s not bad, but it’s a bit confusing. It almost reads as though the primary focus should just be the sex and yet there is like I mentioned plot devices built into them. Toward the end, we finally get some payoff for all of the setup. The lore behind these characters is detailed and elaborate but regrettably, it’s not brought up in a more understandable way through the story. I had to read the book a couple of times to really understand what was going on. I love short stories, I especially love them when they can divulge an entire beginning, middle and ending. Sex is perfectly acceptable to have the focal point, especially since we are adults. But if the story is lacking its progression, even with the sex, well it becomes confusing.
Criticism two as I hinted at, I had to go back and re-read parts of it to be sure that I understood entirely what was going on and realized that the problem is slightly to blame with sentence structure and split dialogue. I’m okay with someone starting off a sentence for dialogue and putting in an action. Where the complications and confusion can appear is when you have the first few words from a sentence of dialogue, two paragraphs of action, and then the end of the dialogue. I’d show you an example of this, but it’d be difficult to recreate. I understood after reading again what the point was, but I feel it would have been clearer if the dialogue wasn’t split like it was in places.
Additionally, there are some grammatical errors, specifically on the inconsistency between ellipsis use and hyphen use. Sometimes it’s an ellipsis, other times the dialogue is split with hyphens and sometimes it’s both. That’s really confusing at times. What I do want to applaud Leon for, is the fact that he uses 3 periods for his ellipsis use, not eight or ten as I’ve seen sometimes with erotica stories.
Now back to a couple of positives. Was the erotica believable and romantic to me? Um, well, I cannot say I understand entirely what anything felt like in that way. I’ll admit it. I’m a happily married woman of thirteen lovely years, but I’ve never done half of the stuff that was depicted, and frankly, I’m not sure I could. I had to use my imagination, and well, it sounded great. I did end up having an interesting discussion with my husband on things for later, but I’m an old lady now in some ways. I think if I attempted a couple of those things, I’d throw my back out for sure and probably sprain something. That said, it’s not a criticism. I’ll gladly admit that I’m a prude and the book is not prudish. Nope, not one bit is this book shy or delicate about the subject matter.
The positive here, “Sugar Plum’d” was very hot. If you are into some very hot stuff, this is your ghost pepper infusion to your sex scenes. What I also liked, it read a lot better than a certain “Fifty Shade” thing that I couldn’t get into. But, there wasn’t really any romance in this book, and that’s fine. I don’t know that it needed it frankly, the ride was just wild enough, I don’t think it needed romance getting mixed. Oh, there was a crush thing, but the intention I’m sure wasn’t romantic. No this was hot-hot-hot for the sake of hot, mixed with warfare and Christmas stuff.
(Santa joke, get it? Ho-ho-ho? No? Too much mom jeans wearing me down? Darn.)
One last thing I enjoyed of note was the clever use of dust. Of course, there was dust! It called to mind my favorite Cheech and Chong bit about “Santa and his Old Lady” which was WONDERFUL. I loved how there were drug-fueled rages and lust scenes mixed with sugar plums and all kinds of naughty stuff. That was clever. This was some book, and if you are interested, by all means, this probably is going to be some guilty pleasure to keep for the holidays.
Score
So what is the score? Well, the positives are big. It’s a complete beginning, middle and ending to a tale about Pembrooke. It has some interesting things to say about the growth of character and learning. However, with the grammatical errors I found, and with the confusion on the scene or visions that were going and coming, I had to consider that in my total.
Without further ado, “Sugar Plum’d” gets an 80% for short story which is a 4 star on Amazon and Goodreads. So if you are looking for a naughty something to get cozy with, consider “Sugar Plum’d” and I’d like to thank Leon again for sending it to me. This was fun.
