The Secret Life of a Submissive

April 8, 2013
This memoir of sadomasochism is riding the 50 Shades of Grey's wave; nevertheless, it manages to distinguish itself as more than a knock-off, and its humorous, down-to-earth approach helps. Sarah K is a recently divorced British romance/erotica writer and single mom who decides to dip her toe into the world of BDSM. The "dom" she meets, Max, is a handsome, charming, "James Bond with a whip". There are plenty of effective graphic sex scenes, which make great use of words like "swollen" and "throbbing", and equipment like "rope" and "ball gags", but in between these episodes, Sarah K's very normal personality asserts itself. She frets about her "pudgy white thighs", enlists the ladies at her local thrift store to help look for "slutty" clothes on a budget, and, at a dinner party in which the "subs" are fed from the "masters'" plates like dogs, is ravenously hungry and complains that the tidbits Max feeds her are "tiny". Still, Sarah and Max's relationship is surprisingly compelling, and the book reaches an poignant climax. A rewarding read for those interested.

February 15, 2013
A British woman's epiphanic transformation from bored divorcee to kinky, sensual slave. Anonymous author Sarah K's novelistic memoir begins sheepishly enough with the author querying her best girlfriends for creative sex scenes to incorporate into an erotic story she'd been writing as "the perfect escape from the realities of a crumbling marriage." But when she found herself a 40-something, divorced, single mother of three grown children, the writing project effectively stoked the flames of a latent fascination with bondage. Intent on finding the "hero" of her sexual fantasies, the author fumbled through online dating and then met Max, a tall, handsome, entrepreneurial "Dom" who immediately asserts respectful authority with a consensual docility contract and "safe words." The dom/sub dance began, awkward and fumbling at first, with the placement of an ownership collar, dungeon play and a lingering scene at a kinky dinner party. Yielding to Max's brinkmanship eventually neutralized her physical insecurities, and the memoir unfurls further through episodes of explicitly described, unbridled surrender. No stranger to the game, Max cautioned her at the onset of their arrangement that a BDSM relationship "changes your life forever." As her transformative journey progressed, it dramatically redefined the author's psychological and sexual boundaries, changes she initially found herself resistant to grasp. These boundaries became blurred, however, when the author allowed her romantic love to sully their hierarchal dynamic. Written with verve, Sarah K's narrative bolsters an already provocative story that is thankfully allowed to play out organically without overextrapolating the base semantics of the BDSM lifestyle. A titillating story for the Fifty Shades set that plumbs the complex, intimate head space of the sexually submissive.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.