May 5, 2012

Review: Serving my Mistress and Her Friends by Denise Smith

There are some books that I don't finish, but there are a lot more that I don't even start, (if you're into acronyms, it would be DNS, to complement DNF).  I decided early on not to post reviews of DNS books on the blog, because I think it would be tedious for all concerned. There are lots of reasons that I don't get past the synopsis or the sample of a book, the two most common being that either the heroine begins to fantasize about being submissive, or the writing is so bad I can't bear it.

For Serving my Mistress, the sample was okay, but really very short, which generally suggests that the whole book is short, so it went into a sort of, meh, maybe of the price came down category, for me. When it was offered free for a short time, I thought 'why not?'.

So it isn't a DNS. And because it was very short, just an estimated 7 pages / 107 kindle locations, it isn't a DNF. It is femdom. And I think that readers would benefit from a review of it. I should review it. The problem is that I don't take pleasure in ripping apart someones hard work. I appreciate the effort that goes into writing and publishing and I don't want to disrespect that. On the other hand, readers put their hard earned money, time and emotional investment into books, and deserve pay off. So if you're likely to be offended by this review, please look away now.

This vignette is written in malesub first person pov and it really suffers from that. Everything is described and there is no dialogue which uses quotes. This makes it really hard work to follow who is saying what, because there is so much, I was told...... This has the secondary consequence of lots of very long paragraphs, which again, are difficult to read. I'm not going to continue listing the grammatical errors of this vignette, because the list would be longer than the piece itself.

Anyhow, the story. The protagonist (he doesn't seem to have a name) is sub to Mistress Laura and is ordered to his Mistress' house to show her friends what an obedient submissive he is. There follows a sort of 'domme off', where the Mistresses seek to outdo each other in front of a male audience. Then the male 'audience' take over and anally and orally rape him. This scene finishes with the other domme admitting that Mistress Laura has more control over her slave - presumably because she allowed the men in the room to take over. (Side note - is that really the sign of a great domme? That her malesub will accept other men taking over from his domme and raping him? WTF?!)

The last third of the vignette describes a separate scene, where the protagonist is again fucked in the ass, this time by and in front of several other male and female doms.

There were some amusing moments - the protagonist almost sneezing come out of his nose made me smile. But basically this was a ten minute stream-of-consciousness describing the protagonist receiving abuse from cardboard cut-out characters. There is no character development at all, no emotion and no relationship between any of the characters, meaningful or otherwise. To be honest, I didn't even find it hot because it was all rather: 'and then he did this, and then I did that'. For me to enjoy a description of degrading acts, I want to know not only what is done, but how the characters feel about it. Not just that it hurts, but how it hurts and how and why that feels good. Suffice to say, I didn't get any of that here.

If the writing had been better, I think I could have dealt with the lack of plot. If the plot and emotion had been stronger, I might have forgiven the awkward writing. If it was longer, I might forgive its current price on Amazon (just over half a dollar a page). I always aim for a balanced review, so I guess I'd better say something that I like about this 'book'. I like the woman on the cover. I also like the fact that Smith is a prolific femdom writer, because let's face it, there aren't very many of those. Unfortunately, though, this story is an F.

2 comments:

  1. wow an F...that was kind of bold of you :), but yeah, I usually avoid novelettes like this because they often lack emotional depth. It's usually very action-driven and dives right into it, which is rather unappealing without some sort background/character development. It makes me feel like I am suddenly thrown into the middle of a low production porn set with unsightly body parts and sticky stuff all around me...yikes.

    By the way I just found out about this blog and I want to say your blog is awesome!

    May I also suggest Diane Whiteside's "The Switch", Ariane Arborene's "Submitting to Alexis" or Jenna Howard's "Spurred On"? The first is a switch story but it happens late in the story. So just ignore the switch part if you want (which many of the online reviewers did when they re-read)!

    I'd like to share my list of female-top novels but I don't want to keep dragging on my comment, so another day... thanks again for the awesome blog!

    ReplyDelete
  2. "I am suddenly thrown into the middle of a low production porn set with unsightly body parts and sticky stuff all around me...yikes"

    Exactly!

    "I want to say your blog is awesome!"

    Thank you - that was just what I needed to keep me blogging today. :)

    I will definitely check out your suggestions - please feel free to share your favorite femdom ish novels any time you like, in comments as long as you choose.

    ReplyDelete