Review Tuesday: Ladies Only anthololgy (#lesfic #ff #eroticromance)

Ladies Only Anthology

By Cari Z, Helena Maeve, R.A. Padmos, HK Carlton, and Lucy Felthouse

Pride Publishing, 2016

Ladies Only is a new lesbian erotic romance anthology from Pride Publishing. I requested a review copy when I saw a post about it on HK Carlton’s blog. The authors featured in the book include some of my favorites (including HK), plus I was delighted to see Pride putting out some F/F fiction.

The book includes five tales in the 10-15K word range. (Overall the PDF version is 205 pages.) Each one focuses on the relationship between two women.

The heroine in “Worth a Shot” by Cari Z has a lucrative business detailing racing cars. Samara dreads the idea of getting a housemate to occupy the other side of her duplex, but when Katie shows up, the young woman seems a perfect fit. Katie and Sam have lots in common—including a strong mutual attraction. As they grow closer, Sam starts imagining they might build a life together. However, Katie’s past is full of secrets. An innocent error on Sam’s part exposes them both to danger and tears them apart, apparently forever.

In “The Woman Next Door” by Helena Maeve, an artist confronts the neighbor whose noisy renovation is preventing her from working, only to discover that the occupant of the condo next door is an old enemy. Eight years before, Yvonne Barros destroyed Ziva’s business and brought Ziva close to bankruptcy. There’s no way Ziva wants her as a neighbor. However, Yvonne has suffered her own reversals. The elegant executive seems to have changed, and to want Ziva as a friend—and more. Ziva’s equally drawn to her nemesis. But can the woman who ruined her once be trusted not to do it again?

R.A. Padmos’ “The Tiny Blue House” is a luscious lesbian fable about love, loss, and wonderful food. Young chef Molly Knowles roams the country in her mobile home, working in kitchens, picking up new recipes, and enjoying the women she meets along the way. When she experiences the cooking of Chiara Loss, it’s love at first taste.

HK Carlton’s “In the Flesh” offers a gritty tale of exotic dancers, mob bosses and undercover cops. ATF officer Kate infiltrates a skin club run by the Traviano crime family, posing as a dancer. She falls hard for Carly, a stunningly talented stripper who’s linked to the mob boss’s son. In a world where the slightest mistake can be deadly, Kate struggles to do her job without giving up her incendiary relationship with Carly.

In “Window Dressing”, Lucy Felthouse creates a feisty young woman who is building a career as a shop-fitter. Jessie is sent from Leeds to London to create an elaborate display for an Oxford Street shop. It’s the most important job she’s ever undertaken—and it’s being supervised by a woman with a legendary reputation for being critical and nasty. At first, Edith lives up to the stories about her dragon-like personality, but as the long night wears on, Jessie gets to see another side of the dragon lady. She finds that Edith is a woman with strong desires—and those desires include Jessie herself.

Overall, Ladies Only is a very enjoyable book. The quality of the writing is uniformly high, while the styles of the authors are sufficiently diverse that I didn’t get bored. I particularly liked the slightly fairy-tale quality of R.A. Padmos’ tale. She creates a happily-ever-after world where you find yourself exactly where you’re supposed to be: in seaside town where a long-time lesbian couple has the ideal spot for parking your trailer, and where your soul mate works in the kitchen.

HK Carlton’s story features wonderfully intense sex scenes. “In the Flesh” captures the sensual quality of dancing and reflects my personal experience that dancing is often the first step toward making love. Actually, I found the plot in this story rather implausible. However, the chemistry between Kate and Carly more or less distracted me from that weakness.

The characters in the other three stories pulled me in, especially Ziva. I loved the portrayal of her artistic talent, the fact that she never knows what she’ll paint until she’s standing in front of the canvas. To be honest, however, I found the erotic aspects of these three stories a bit perfunctory and unconvincing. Compared to other lesbian erotic romance I’ve read, these stories seemed a bit thin.

One reason for this, I think, is the rather awkward length of the stories in the collection. They’re neither true short stories nor novellas, but something in between. Too long to have the stunning immediacy of a vignette, they’re still too brief to really explore the development of an emotional and sexual relationship. I’ve encountered the frustrations of this length myself. More than once reviewers have commented on what seemed like abrupt endings in my 15K stories. The fact is, I more or less ran out of word count.

In any case, I’m delighted to see Pride Publishing releasing more lesbian fiction. Ladies Only is a solid collection which I think may be particularly appropriate for readers of other romance subgenres who are curious about F/F relationships. There’s nothing scary or foreign here—just pairs of women who fall in love, like anyone else.

The Principle of Love

By R.A. Padmos (Guest Blogger)

The Bookshop tells the story of a Dutch bookseller, Jakoba Huyzen. Although the timeline stretches out over most of the twentieth century, the occupation of Holland by the Nazis lies at the centre of Jakoba’s memories. It’s probably not that hard to imagine the impact those five years had on the people who were alive at that time. Even if we realise that for some it were years of unimaginable suffering while others simply went on with their daily business, all had to make some hard moral choices. To resist the Nazis came at a price, but so did doing nothing. Many German soldiers were decent guys, but they were still part of an army that fought for a criminal state. Of course Jews were our neighbours, but should we be expected to offer them a place to hide if it meant that our own children risked losing their parents?

Jakoba first and foremost sees what connects her with other people, not what makes them different. Her staunch refusal to consider people as anything other than complicated individuals who should never be judged solely by their sex, religion, sexuality or nationality doesn’t change simply because it’s war. Her circle of friends is as eclectic as the books she sells in her shop. It’s for that reason that she sees no contradiction in helping Jewish friends and her love for German propaganda photographer Armin. To her both forms of love are closely connected and she stubbornly refuses to allow herself to step outside her own philosophy about right and wrong. If a price has to be paid, then let it be so.

About The Bookshop

Even I, who had resisted kicking and screaming, had to admit defeat. Why would love be impressed by the protests of a simple bookseller?

Jakoba has had enough. It is 1999 and she looks back on her life that began at the start of the century. Her arrival was unexpected, but joyfully welcomed, by her middle-aged parents. In a time where a middle-class girl has one destiny, namely to become a wife and mother, Jakoba is allowed to start working at a bookshop. Books become one of the loves of her life. Later she will inherit the shop.

She values friendship, but romance has no meaning for her. She values her independence too much and knows all too well what price women pay for being married.

It is German army photographer Armin who will change the course of her life. Jakoba is forty when she meets him. Armin is almost thirty, and Germany has occupied Holland. It does not matter. For him, she’s the one, and despite her hesitation both because of the war and because she can’t understand what this handsome man sees in her—a plain woman—she has to admit her feelings for him.

Such love has consequences for both of them that will reach far beyond the war and in ways Jakoba could never have imagined.

An excerpt

We were standing so close that we could have touched, but we didn’t. The distance, however small, was something neither of us tried to bridge. Someone knocked on the door, a soldier in the uniform of the occupiers asked something in German and I remembered where I was and Someone had noticed me and it was impossible for me to turn the time back to the shadow of anonymity. Just because I had seen hundreds of customers come and go, many a hundred times and more, did not mean all those people had taken much notice of me beyond my function as shop owner. Armin Deutz didn’t want to buy or borrow from me or didn’t even seem to require my friendship. I had no idea what he did want.

* * * *

 

I so intensely wanted to touch him, there in that darkroom between the photos. My hands almost hurt from the memory of how much I wanted to touch him on that day in 1940, so many years ago. That longing never went away, and to me that has always remained one of the biggest mysteries of all.

The Bookshop is available at: https://www.totallybound.com/book/the-bookshop

Blog: https://rapadmos.wordpress.com/

Loving a man: the courage of a non-hero

By R.A. Padmos (Guest Blogger)

It sometimes happens that we writers, who have lived with our characters for months, sometimes even years, discover something very essential about that fictional person we weren’t fully aware of when we were in the process of writing.

Dylan Archer, the main character of In the Privacy of their Home, is a gay man living in the England of the Sixties. Sex between men was illegal. Anti-homosexuality laws don’t exist in a vacuum, but are a reflection of how society thinks about human relationships. Dylan can’t help but internalise this philosophy to the point he’s almost unable to express any kind of feelings out of fear someone might notice “something that is not quite right" He’s one of those gay men who’s able to pass as straight without even trying, and he’s not planning on making the people around him think anything else. In short, Dylan is a man afraid to live life even the tiniest step beyond what he feels society allows.

Then he meets Max, office-help, aspiring artist and all-round cutie. And he does something quite unusual. He not only falls in love (because that is something that can’t be controlled) but he accepts those feelings. He even goes so far as to celebrate them.

Even as this character’s creator, I can only become aware of his quiet courage and admire him for it. As a gay woman of a younger generation (Dylan Archer is born around 1937 and I in 1961) I have a pretty good idea, and not just from the standpoint of an observer, what it means to simply admit to yourself that you’re in love with someone of the same sex and enjoy it too. I know it sounds pretentious, but in a way, writing this kind of stories connects me to the nearly invisible gay men and women of the past.

Being the kind of man he is, and the reality of place and time, Dylan assumes his feelings won’t be reciprocated. But when Max tells him how much he in return is attracted to Dylan on the day sex between men becomes legal (which, I admit is not exactly subtle symbolism) Dylan again proves he’s braver than he ever thought possible. He has the courage to embrace love, to let go when he thinks the time has come, and rethink his sacrifice when it has a different effect from what he intended.

Who knows, he might even get married one day…

A small taste?

It was half past five and time to go home. The weatherman had been right after all, it turned out to be a lovely day and Dylan enjoyed his short walk to the bus stop. The streets were busy with people leaving the offices and Dylan couldn't stop himself noticing a tall, muscular man with dark hair walking past him …

No, don't do that. You had better look at that girl, the blonde one in the miniskirt - that one, yes. Do it discreetly, but make sure people around you know you're a healthy man with a healthy appreciation for the female form. Now stop it, don't overdo it. That handsome man across the street? Don't even notice him. Blank stare, you've seen nothing. Perhaps he notices you, he might like you, but don't give yourself away. Not to him, not to anyone. Look, another cute girl in a miniskirt.

About In the Privacy of Their Home

Dylan’s life is regulated and precise, and as a gay man in the England of the 1960s it’s also necessarily secretive; the law regarding homosexuality may have changed, but unfortunately society’s attitudes are slow to catch up. Meeting Max – younger and less inhibited – is a shock to Dylan’s system; suddenly his world, which has been black and white, explodes into vivid colour. But loving Max is not without difficulty; Max is an artist, talented and ambitious, and there’s no way someone as ordinary as Dylan can hold on to him for long … or is there?

I will give away one copy of In the Privacy of their Home. Simply state in your reaction that you are interested, together with an e-mail address where I can reach you in case you win.

In the Privacy of their Home by R.A.Padmos is available as e-book at:

Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Their-Home-R-A-Padmos-ebook/dp/B017E2Y57U/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1W5BTJNVX6EZ37YWKXVS

AllRomance: https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-intheprivacyoftheirhome-1914008-367.html

Barns&Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/in-the-privacy-of-their-home-ra-padmos/1122885447?ean=2940152440768

Find out more about me!

Blog: https://rapadmos.wordpress.com/

The Reluctant Alpha

By S. Dora (Guest Blogger)

Thank you, Lisabet, for being once again such a wonderful and generous host.

I have a confession to make. Don’t worry, it’s only a small and rather insignificant one, but for a writer of the erotic-romantic genre interesting enough to tell about. I don’t care for the alpha male as fictional character. You know, the one who combines a huge amount of self-confidence with a far above average talent to take the lead and make the decisions. Those traits often go together with an impressively muscled physique and unmistakable masculine facial features. Of course, if he isn’t actually in a leader’s position within his trade, then he will have a high-testosterone job, like soldier, policeman, fire-fighter or adventurer.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I can understand, up to a certain point, why this character is so hugely popular in the erotic-romance stories and why they are a fixed element in so many fantasies of straight women and gay men (and of course of bisexuals of both sexes). He’ll make sure you’ll never have a dull moment and looks good while doing that.

Also, the alpha male is perhaps relatively easy to write. He’s often the one creating the action, the one who has all the adventures, who takes risks and probably doesn’t run away from a fight. Whatever his weaknesses as a character may be, boring isn’t one of them.

And yet, the alpha male has never been a huge inspiration for me as (main) character for my stories. Not that I’ve always been aware of this fact, or that it was ever a conscious decision, it simply didn’t happen. It’s only recently that I started to notice the pattern. It doesn’t matter if it’s the “serious stuff” I write as R.A. Padmos or the erotica by S. Dora, none of my main characters could be described as alpha males by any stretch of the imagination.

My main characters are observers and outsiders. They doubt far beyond simply having initial doubts about something before they make up their minds. They are never quite certain about their own worth, honestly surprised as they are that a beautiful and interesting human being can truly be in love with them.

Take Isaac Newhouse, for instance. He’s the main character of my M/M BDSM series Calling the Shots. He’s close to forty, has a middle-management job at the office of an insurance company and he knows all too well he doesn’t have the makings of a romance hero. No way he could be the dominant in a D/s relationship with his younger lover, Tom. He, the gentle soul, could never order his lover to get on his knees and call him Sir.

But there you have it. What starts as an afternoon of sex with a bit of kink becomes so much more when Isaac finds the courage to admit that his lover’s need to be submissive during sex resonates something inside him that he hadn’t been aware of before. It’s not that he thinks there’s anything intrinsically wrong with BDSM, he just doesn’t believe he has the makings of a good (enough) dominant.

Isaac is an eager student, with lots of questions. He never assumes to be right about anything concerning his role as dominant. This makes him perhaps a bit different from the dominants we often see in romantic-erotica, but if a character like Isaac makes you curious, then I’m happy to tell you that Part One of the series,  Facing the Truth, is available at Total E-Bound and the next one, The Right Direction, will be published on August 24^th. Pre-orders, starting at the 13^th of August, will be rewarded with a 15% discount. (http://www.total-e-bound.com/authordetail.asp?A_ID=203#booklist) I hope to be able to present my publisher with Part Three soon.

A small excerpt from The Right Direction

Isaac had been slightly worried that the package of toys he had ordered from the online adult store would not get there in time, but on Thursday afternoon, right after he returned from work, the doorbell rang and the postman handed it to him.

He walked straight to the bedroom, with Tom in his wake. “Can I take a peek?”

“No.”

Tom pouted. “Not even if I wear my collar? You know, do a trial run?”

“Again, no.” Isaac managed to sound stern, but only just.

“Okay, I get the message. I’ll make supper.” Tom gave in. “It’s not like you can hide it from me, anyway. If I really want to know what’s in that package, I will find it.” He must have seen the look of disappointment on Isaac’s face, because he hastened to say, “That’s not what I meant. You can put everything in the toy drawer and I give you my promise not to peek unless you tell me to. Though if you’ve bought as many toys as I think you have, there won’t be enough space in one drawer, so you might want to use the other one as well.”

Isaac kissed him. “Thanks for being a good sport. What are we having for supper?”

Tom winked. “That’s for me to know and for you to find out.”

Before Isaac could react, his lover was gone. He laughed for a moment, then stared at the box wrapped in brown paper and went very quiet. This was what he had ordered and paid for. He had masturbated thinking about how he was going to use his purchases on his sub. While it was for fun and spicing up sex, he couldn’t help but think it had become so much more. They hadn’t needed any formal rituals to use a cock ring or a string of anal beads, yet Tom had knelt at his feet, called him Sir and had looked so full of joy when Isaac had given him his collar.

With slightly trembling hands, he tore away the paper and opened the box. He quickly unpacked everything and placed the items neatly on the bed. He gazed at the collection for what must have been minutes before he finally picked up the flogger. Starting by admiring the handiwork of the craftsman who had made the object was the safest option. Though he had never before held a flogger in his hands, Isaac recognised the exquisite detailing and perfect balance. According to the description on the website, this particular flogger was perfect for teasing a sub, but also made for a nice thud. Isaac hadn’t been sure what thud meant in relation to sting, but now that he was holding the object, the words came alive. He caressed the inside of his forearm with the suede stripes and smiled. In his mind, he could already see Tom’s shivers of anticipation when he introduced his lover to this fine instrument.

The cane, however, told a very different story. In all its stern simplicity, it spoke of danger. A disconcerting quiver of pleasure shot down his spine. His cock filled. Quickly, he put the cane back.

The whip wasn’t much safer either, though for some reason slightly more emotionally neutral than the cane, so he left it where it was. He assessed that, in order to be able to use it comfortably on his sub, he would have to practise. Preferably in private so Tom wouldn’t see or hear him. His sub deserved the best his Dom had to offer, even if the perfect stroke of the whip was not something his much-admired Sir had been born with. Illusion was as much a part of BDSM play as with any theatrical act.

S. Dora

R.A. Padmos

My S. Dora blog:http://sdora.wordpress.com/

My R.A. Padmos blog: http://rapadmos.wordpress.com/