People kept recommending this book to me and it kept showing up on lists alongside my own books which made me curious. ESCAPE FROM PARADISE is one of those captivity eroticas written in the vein of CAPTIVE IN THE DARK and COMFORT FOOD. The heroine, Angela, is sneaking on a trip to Cancun with her besties after lying to her overprotective parents. But then she hooks up with a sleazebag who intends to hit it and quit it, non-con style, which leaves it up to his even creepier and sleazebaggier dad to clean up his mess.
I have mixed thoughts about this book. There were some things it did well. The whole psychology of sex trafficking, I felt, were handled with an attempt at gravity by the author (which you don't always see in books like these). I liked the time she spent on the psychology of the book and how there was a lot of metatext about rape fantasies and consent, which are still highly relevant to the dark romance discourse to this day. I also thought it was interesting how the hero was sort of an undercover agent who was fucking the heroine as a slave despite feeling kind of remorseful about it. That was an interesting dynamic I don't think I've seen except in KILLING SARAI, maybe.
I did get a little bored with this book after a while though. It alternates between edgy and cringe at times. Like there's a scene where the heroine is given an enema and made to shit in a bucket as punishment, and another where she's forced to watch a LITERAL threesome where two girls dressed up as a granny and Red Riding Hood are "raped" by a man in a wolf costume lmao. But then when Colin and Angela finally meet, it's like the author really needed there to be an instant connection between them, and all the weird and shocking stuff just kind of went out the window.
Also, not to be an asshole but the Spanish is SO BAD. I speak it pretty well and even though I'm not fully fluent, I noticed tons of errors. Angela was described with masculine adjectives, words were misspelled (dias was spelled with a Z, as in "Diaz"), the wrong tense forms were used (venga conmigo instead of "ven conmigo," which is literally a Christina Aguilera song are you not cultured? jk). She also wrote out the Spanish accent for her characters which felt a little cringe and stereotypical. Some of the Spanish was really good and I was impressed by some of what she got right, but it felt like she was using a language translator, which can always be kind of finicky-- especially since, fun fact, a lot of the time the language translator defaults to masculine forms since that's used as the default.
Overall, I thought this was ok. I think the author made an attempt to give her heroine some modicum of agency in a genre that often feels exploitative and she wrote a book that was compelling enough that I wanted to read it to the end. It looks like she's become pretty inactive now and the sequel about Josef never came to light. That's kind of sad but I get it. Sometimes real life gets in the way of the side hustle. Hope she's doing all right and living her best life.
If you enjoy captivity romances, you'll enjoy this.
The early 2010s were dark times. FIFTY SHADES OF GREY was a best-seller and everyone wanted to write the Next Big Thing. It didn't take long for people to go from writing about tortured porn to torture porn, and pretty soon we ended up with, well, a lot of books like these. HELD has been on my radar for a while because it frequently appears on the "Readers Also Enjoyed" tab for my Horrorscape series. Naturally, curiosity took over and made me want to check this book out.
First, a caveat. This book is dark. I don't think I've read or watched anything so horrific since The Collector (the one made by the Saw guy, not the one based on the John Fowles novel) or maybe since the tail end of Stephen King's MISERY. HELD is about people-- women-- getting tortured in incredibly brutal and graphic ways, and it was almost too much even for me. I think I was able to prepare for it since the negative reviews for this book were so detailed and helpful, so keep in mind that if this is a sensitive point with you, you should steer clear of this book.
That said, I actually liked HELD a lot more than I was expecting to. It's funny that this appears as a suggestion for my work because I actually had an idea similar to this-- although nowhere near so well-thought out. Nicole is just an ordinary wife and mom until she is abducted at gunpoint in a grocery store parking lot. Her captor is a man named Ron, averagely good-looking and 100% psycho. Ron finds Nicole amusing, and decides to keep her as his own. A fate that seems horrible until she finds out about the other women he keeps downstairs, the ones he calls his "basement bitches."
Ron is a failed author who wants to try again. This time, he's decided to do research for his horror novel-- by committing the horrific acts himself. He's certain it will be a best-seller. He has moments of being charming and funny that are quickly eclipsed by calculated acts of sadism. He claims to want Nicole's love, but not even she is safe from his whims. She knows she has to escape, but she isn't sure how, and time is running out, as Ron's novel is close to being finished...
So, if this had been brutality for the sake of brutality, I probably wouldn't have been able to finish. But this was more of a (very violent) work of psychological suspense, as well as a survival story. Nicole is funny-- it's clear to see why Ron decides to keep her-- but she's also selfish and a little cruel in her quest for survival, and she's forced to see the very worst of herself as she does what's needed to survive. I sped through this book pretty quickly wanting to see what happened. The book doesn't quite end on a cliffhanger, but it doesn't have the closure I need, either. I guess we have to get the second book to see whether or not Nicole gets to have her revenge.
If you can stomach dark and gory reads, you might like this. It's not for everyone but it has a really great story line with fast pacing and definitely creeped me out. I'll probably read the sequel. :)
Pull up several seats, my friends, because I have a lot of thoughts on THE SHEIK RETOLD. This book first caught my attention during the summer of 2013. It's an erotic "retelling" of E.M. Hull's bodice-ripper precursor, THE SHEIK, which was initially published in 1919. Unlike many of the people reviewing this, I've actually read the original. It was written in 1919, so it doesn't have much in the way of sexual content, although there is a lot of sexual tension. And violence. And racism. And smoking. It's basically everything good and bad about 1919, while bursting at the seams with repressed sexuality. It desperately wishes it was born sixty years later, so it could be the bodice-ripper it so badly wants to be.
I think the Smart Bitches ladies hit the nail on the head with their review, but I'll tell you what I think, as well. THE SHEIK RETOLD peppers its pages with the sexual scenes that were not in the original. It's an erotic romance, and initially I was really excited, because I thought to myself, "Finally! This is going to be Rosemary Rogers levels of fucked up bodice-rippery! I can't wait!" The author also rewrote it to be in the first person (I believe the original was written in the third person), which makes it much more intimate and personal. Also a win.
The problem is that when the author was rewriting the book, she took out a lot of the things that made it so much fun. I'm not sorry at all to see the racist slurs removed, because, you know, racist slurs. But trying to take a book that would have been non-con and making it into a "no-no-yes-yes-yes!" style dub-con with the heroine deciding that she's going to take ownership of her abuse and make herself like it because feminism really isn't much better. Honestly, keeping the scenes as rape would have been better than these weird, self-hating mental gymnastics the heroine puts herself through.It also messes with his character, because the sheik is a cruel and brutal man, so removing these scenes, as well as the violence, really lessons the impact of a story that, in the original, uses the allegory of horse-breaking and horse-killing to allude to his method's of "taming" a woman.
The beginning of this book was great, but after the sex scenes, things kind of fell apart for me. What a disappointment. In some ways, this is more readable than the original and it's certainly less offensive, but I'm really not certain that the author ended up making this a better story. I'm not sure I'd read anything else by this author in the near future. This smacks of 90s bodice-ripper hypocrisy (and you KNOW how I feel about the wishy-washy sex scenes of 90s bodice-rippers). That said, I'm totally in favor of authors taking and rewriting the classics to fill them with the smut that we all deserve. I know the purists may disagree, but I am a trash can and will never say no to well-written smut.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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