Hmm. What can I say about this one? Well, it’s not completely awful, but it’s not really good either. It’s certainly readable, and I’ve already downloaded a sample of the second book (the first one ends on a freakin’ cliffhanger…..), so I may keep going through the series. But then again, I’m a narrative junkie, and I just can’t STAND leaving off in the middle of a story. Even a mediocre one.

Sigh. That’s how I ended up finishing the whole Twilight series, which I wasn’t really crazy about., but I couldn’t quite put down either. Though at least the Twilight books have the benefit of actual PLOT and actual SUSPENSE and INTERESTING REVELATIONS, while, sheesh, this book doesn’t.

How are they going to make a movie out of it? It’s all sex (and not even particularly kinky—very light bondage and a couple spankings), a few vaguely witty email exchanges (more cutesy than witty), a few gourmet meals with little conversation, a couple uneventful helicopter rides also with little conversation, and a lot of inner angsty pondering that mostly involves sentences like “my inner goddess is doing the hula” and “my subconscious glares at me and says ho!” (Yeah, her inner goddess and her subconscious make many, many, many appearances in the book. They’re practically characters. They wave pom-poms. They hide behind the couch. They samba. They pass out. Frankly, they’re a lot more active than either the hero or the heroine. Oh, and can someone please let this author know that we’re not supposed to be in direct communication with the workings of the subconscious? That’s why it’s called “sub.” It’s deep down. Hidden away. Not sitting right there in the living room with you sneering or making snarky comments to your face.)

Speaking of “sub,” that’s the one interesting aspect of the book, and it does create enough conflict to generate a little emotion. As I’m sure anyone who reads People or watches Entertainment Tonight already knows, the hero is a Dominant who really, really wants to buckle the heroine up in various harnesses and swat her with a variety of implements. Now, in your typical BDSM romance, what usually follows is that the heroine, though scared at first, realizes pretty quickly that she is in fact a natural-born Sub, and the kinky sex brings them both to astonishing new levels of intimacy. But this heroine, we’re told, is not a natural submissive….even though she has about sixty million cataclysmic orgasms whenever the hero ties her up. (Oh, the inconsistencies are maddening: several times throughout the book, just when she’s telling him exactly how uncomfortable his proclivities make her feel, and insisting it’s not right for her, and she needs to be able to touch him and look him in the eye, she suddenly and for ABSOLUTELY NO APPARENT EMOTIONAL OR PSYCHOLOGICAL REASON tells him, “Okay, I’ll try to do it your way,” and they go off and have some of their mildly kinky sex.)

But, anyway, she really doesn’t enjoy pain, and she thinks the hero’s kind of a pervert, and she keeps refusing to actually sign the really creepy contract the hero pressures her to sign, and so there really is some reason for her to keep pulling away from him. (Even though it’s obvious from the very start that the guy IS totally falling in love with her and forging all sorts of new territory around being tender and intimate.)

So, you know, there’s some conflict. Some angst.

Not that I particularly cared, since the heroine (despite the insistence on her high GPA and her love of 19th-century novels and her “smart mouth”) sounds like a 13-year-old Valley Girl. (Much of her dialogue involves the phrases, “Holy shit!” and “Triple crap!” and some version of “Oh, my God, this is hot!”)

She seems to love the hero mostly because he’s really, really incredibly good-looking and plays the piano in a soulful way. I have no idea why he loves her, since she’s a total Mary Sue: a mousy, spineless, personality-free non-entity most of the time….who nonetheless is always being told how “beautiful” and “brilliant” and “witty” she is, with a whole host of men falling obsessively in love with her….blergh…. Honestly, she makes Bella Swan seem like a character out of Shakespeare.

So, um, read this book just so you know what your neighbors are talking about, but if you want seriously good romance, strong characters, and writing worth reading, look elsewhere, my friends.