Ooo, what’s that?
So I decided to review these two books together because they really are inseparable. You can’t read one and not read the other. That’s just the way it is.
They are Carrie’s Story
How is it?
| Rayne’s Rating: |   |
|---|---|
| Pros: | Cons: |
| realistic characters realistic BDSM scenes hot sex scenes | I’m on the fence about the plot. Consent’s a little murky. |
I need to start by saying that I really wish publishers would put warnings on fictional kink books. Nothing major; just a short “Some of the acts in this book are ill-advised. Please educate yourself in kink before participating.” or something.
I know my opinion is an unpopular one. People consider warnings on books censorship. But a warning isn’t the same thing as telling someone not to read them.
People also feel like you shouldn’t have to tell someone not to use a fictional story about BDSM as a guide on how to get started, but you have to tell people not to put hemorrhoid cream in their mouth, and not to take their toasters in the bathtub with them, so why wouldn’t you have to tell people not to use a fictional story about BDSM as a guide?
We put warnings on coffee, and television shows, and bags of dirt, and freakin commercials with flying cars. Books seem like they could use a warning occasionally, too. Especially in the wake of 50 Shades.
Not that the stories in this series are particularly dangerous or impossible, but some of them could have turned out badly if they weren’t controlled by the omniscient hand of an erotica author, and I feel like the reader needs to know that, because there are stupid people in the world who think that if you’re writing about kink, you know what you’re talking about, and the acts in your story are completely safe, so it’s safe to try to reenact the stories in your books.
The series is well written. It’s full of plot twists you didn’t see coming. The author does a good job of making you expect one thing, and then doing another. Or maybe that’s just me. I’m just really on the fence about the plot.
I don’t usually include spoilers in book reviews if I can avoid it, but I really need to talk about this book. Skip ahead to where I say you can look if you want to avoid them.
SPOILER ALERT!
So it starts with this punk rock messenger girl (Carrie) who ends up watching kinky porn at a film party, meeting a dominant who’s a lot like Christian Grey (in personality, anyway. He’s arrogant, entitled, and weird), and hooking up with him at his house the next night without so much as a thought to who the guy is or her own safety.
Jonathan knows what he wants and goes for it, telling Carrie flat out at the party that he wants her to be his slave. Carrie’s only experience with this is porn and erotica, and that is obviously part of the draw for Jonathan.
When she arrives at his house, there is no conversation about what’s going to happen. He just unceremoniously undresses her, hangs her on a chain, and inspects her as you would a show dog…sort of.
Punk rock girl becomes Jonathan’s sex slave, and starts visiting him on a specific schedule, and being handled like sexual property by pretty much anyone she comes in contact with when she’s with him. It’s all very believable (especially when one considers it’s similar to how my relationship with M started…though we had lots of conversations about what I liked and what he wanted to do to me and what I was okay with before any slavey type stuff happened), and incredibly hot, but you’re left feeling like Carrie may have forgotten to come up for air, and holy shit, is she gonna drown?
However, Carrie is happy, enthralled, entranced by her experiences. And by the end of the first book, when Carrie agrees to be sold at a slave auction, you’re not particularly surprised. What you are surprised by is the…”love letter?”…she receives from Jonathan before she’s taken to her new master’s pony ranch.
The auction’s not what you think. The money goes into a savings account (or was it escrow? Something, anyway) until the end of the slave’s contract. When the slave is released, they have a rather sizable chunk of change to live on until they decide what to do with their life going forward. While completely illegal, the slave auctions are just as much about the slave as they are the slave owners, which is refreshing. Many kink books that include slave auctions are more about the fantasy of truly owning a sexual creature, with or without consent.
When Carrie agrees to be sold, Jonathan has her trained and carted off to auction.
The first book is erotic and delicious. Some of the sex scenes are a little cold, but not creepy like they are in 50 Shades. And though consent is never really discussed in the way that current sex positive gurus would like, it’s obvious that Carrie’s participation is enthusiastic.
It started to go downhill for me in the second book.
The second book starts when Carrie meets Jonathan after her year on the pony ranch. Jonathan asks her to tell him about it, and the book becomes a volley of stories. Carrie tells Jonathan about her days on the ranch, and he tells her about his days without her.
Full disclosure: pony play freaks me out. I don’t know why.
I mean, I have a serious aversion to things on my face and other people’s faces. We’ve actually left a stage at a music festival because the band was wearing masks, and it triggered a panic attack. It worked out because we were hungry anyway. So it could be the bridles, and such.
But if I’m to be honest, I don’t really react as violently to pony play as I do rock bands in masks. I can watch pony shows, and find the ponies elegant and sexy, but there’s something about me actually being a pony that freaks me the fuck out. So I had a love/hate relationship with Carrie’s experiences at the ranch.
Nothing particularly bad happened. A lot of the scenes were super hot. The idea of a place where people are fed human pony feed, trained to behave like ponies, kept as livestock is hella sexy. Carrie enjoyed the experience and grew from it. It’s just not really my favorite kink.
Then, once Carrie decides she’d like to be Jonathan’s official slave, you find out this whole time Jonathan’s had a girlfriend, who he’s in love with, and had fully intended to let Carrie go about her life after the pony ranch, but his girlfriend decided to “give” Carrie to him as a birthday present without discussing it with Carrie at alld. And that’s about where I lose all interest in the story. Even more so when it becomes apparent that Jonathan thinks he’s doing Carrie a favor by telling her about all this; as if he could have just kept her as a slave and never told her, and it would have been within his right as her owner.
One could argue that this is Carrie’s fault because she chose to submit to Jonathan’s ‘no questions asked’ policy without first asking any questions. But in the real world, Jonathan’s ‘no questions asked’ policy would be considered by most to be an attempt to force a submissive to allow him to push their boundaries. That’s not the way consent works.
Though the end makes perfect sense, it kind of pissed me off. Carrie’s decision to leave while Jonathan is out felt more like a wounded puppy running away with her tail between her legs than a confident submissive asserting her right to determine her own sexuality. It just didn’t feel right to me. Kind of…killed Carrie’s moment of triumph for me. Like maybe Carrie lost some of her fire while she was on the pony ranch.
Granted, the Carrie I’d built in my head wouldn’t have made a scene. She doesn’t seem the type to humiliate a dominant–her dominant–by telling him all about himself in overly dramatic fashion. But knowing that she was fully in the right (and Jonathan was a total douchebag), she would have left with dignity, instead of running away while he stepped out.
Judging by the fact that the foreword of Carrie’s Story is written by Tristan Taormino, I’m gonna go ahead and say that not everyone agrees with me about this book. In fact, I know lots of people who really got off on the idea of being Carrie, and aren’t really concerned with the issues I brought up. I’m just not one of them.
I guess I’m not as on the fence about the plot as I thought.
Where’d ya get it?
Cleis Press sent me this book free of charge in exchange for an honest review.
I had a really awesome blurb here about the neat motivations behind the creation of Cleis Press, but then they went and sold themselves to a nasty publisher who has absolutely no respect for writers, and things rapidly slid downhill. You can read about that here. When I spoke out about it on Twitter (if you can even call it that), they blocked me. So…yeah.