Month: March 2026

“Hidden Claws” by MT Addams [Femdom Book Review]

by

This week, we are back in the bonkers, QAnon adjacent world of contemporary dark romance, for an F/mm about three immensely messed up individuals, one of whom is a yandere flavoured serial killer and one of whom is doing a sort of budget V for Vendetta style effort to  replicate her exact trauma to make the sub into what he needs to be reborn. 

The third character, Malek, is not exactly in a healthy place either, in the middle act of a downward spiral. As a teenager, family pulled him into human trafficking and then died messily in front of him mid-crime, dropping him into juvie and then an adulthood of unstable low paid work, substance abuse and violent outbursts. Those latter two factors have landed him in jail, looking at his first of what will clearly be a series of adult incarcerations, likely ending with his death or a life sentence. 

Fortunately for him, he is offered a diversion program, a stay at a luxury facility to get his life back on track. Unfortunately, it’s a trap.  The cop that arrested him, Mason, is owed a favour by his dominant, Jasmine, and asks her to take on Malek’s rehabilitation. Contrary to first impressions, however, this is no altruistic act. Jasmine, while she does enjoy remaking and rebuilding individuals, keeps things on a strict six month timeline. Mason has finagled his way to a second six months, but he knows that’s likely to be it. Therefore Mason has hatched a plan to give Jasmine a submissive so hard to handle she’s forced to turn to him for help and thence see she should keep him around permanently. 

This second male lead is a complete piece of work, putting the B into ACAB. Inversely he is a pretty good example of an under explored trope for male subs, if you want a more classic bad news romance hero. He is an inveterate schemer and boundary pusher, but offers that fun-only-in-fiction trait that he will do literally anything to be with you. Even murder. I think that from a story perspective it’s good to see this sort of character be explicitly coded as submissive as it works very well with the real life tension between someone’s submissive desires versus their real world agency.

The second male lead, Malek is a more traditional sort of character and a depiction as a sub, a more straight forward invitation to ride along with his reactions to his captivity. He is cocky and takes a long time to break, but ultimately slides into a much less complex state of attached submission to Jasmine once her mental conditioning starts to work on him. While we get a lot of his perspective, it’s mostly suffering and confusion, either something to linger on as a sadist or to vicariously project yourself into for a more masochistic read. 

Of course rounding this out, the domme in this story, Jasmine, has secrets of her own. The fact that she has near infinite wealth and a mansion equip to hold people prisoner and brainwash them is a matter of inheritance. Specifically, she is a survivor of a much less positively motivated sex slave trafficking ring, who eventually navigated her way from teenage victim, to non-consensual trophy wife and with a little judicious murder, wealthy widow. The remainder of the trafficking ring is now being kept at arms length by mutually assured destruction through the various blackmail evidence they have on each other, and consensual BDSM is her hobby to get some social contact while still keeping strict boundaries on the rest of the world. 

Mason, of course, is here to destroy all that. While the trafficking ring she escaped are the true villains of the story, it would be accurate to call him the major antagonist. His role is to stir up Jasmine’s stalker, be a sort of puckish bad influence on Malek, but above all provide a pretty rare scenario of male sub to male sub jealousy. This is another thing that makes this book unusual as while there’s a million different versions of cuckolding fantasies that lean MF/m or M/fm, it’s pretty rare for there to be as much emphasis on sub feeling insecure relative to each other. Honestly, I think this is a lot more common to how dommes would prefer things if they want drama in their harems. As much as it creates room for Mason to feel off putting (if your ideal submissive is safe, this won’t work for you), it does succeed in selling the fantasy of being treated like you are the most important person in the would by multiple men 

On the other hand, as is many “why choose?” books, there’s also an inevitable amount of convenient bisexuality. The glue that holds the triad together is the two men’s attachment to Jasmine, but part of the resolution of this is that her two pets develop a sort of strong erotic friendship. This is particularly important when you get to the final conflict of the story that presents Malek with an opportunity to choose Jasmine for himself rather than be forced to submit to her.

And related to that, as a review I should probably flag that while I would not describe this as switchy, Jasmine’s bad experiences do not focus on making her disproportionately powerful. She barely has a handle on Mason, who tries to top from the bottom constantly, is playing cat and mouse with her former tormentors, and while her treatment of Malek is framed as effective, there’s a bunch of arms length distance she has with her subs that we are supposed to see as the thing to be broken down and discarded. Her two lovers are going to help her get there, but it’s going to mean we accept that they might know better than her.

Finally, as I mentioned, this is a bonkers story. It’s a world where human traffickers put multiple women in separate duffle bags to move them around, as if this was a sensible of viable way to transport people, and where you can get a private security team to be loyal to you but indifferent to the unethical sex slavery that’s happening under their noses. It’s one where you can apparently divert a prisoner from a jail and make his charges evaporate without anyone caring all too much. Honestly, in the former situation I somewhat suspect that the author started this off as a more straightforward idea that the diversion program was entirely just how this society worked and then changed their mind two or so chapters in. It doesn’t hurt the story’s readability, but it does cause a bunch of rapid tone shifts that are a bit incongruent from how the characters are first introduced.

In all, I liked it the way one likes an action/thriller you use to fill an evening. It scratched an itch I have for darker materials and while I think would have liked Jasmine to have a bit of a stronger role, the parts of the story that made it different from most of its genre were fun enough I’d be interested to see what else MT Addams did or does with femdom.

  • Where to Buy: Amazon
  • Author Website: https://mtaddams.com/books/

Liked this review? Check out more titles in my 2026 Femdom Book Review Project!

“My Best Friend’s Honeymoon” by Meryl Wilsner [Femdom Book Review]

by
My Best Friend's Honeymoon By Meryl Wilsner

Last month’s Beguiled Books outing got me not just the second in the Secret Illuminations duology, but two others that the gentleman running the counter assured me were femdom. The Sea Witch was one, this is the other, so I will be due for a trip back shortly to restock.  Unsurprisingly, all three purchases were in some way in the non-traditional space, more reliable hunting grounds. You would think it would be otherwise, just based on probability by the sheer volume of books published, but most non indie het romance tends not to want to gamble outside of the current trend of the moment. I do predict some more attempts at “Villainess” stories out of the Romantasy space, but most of these will probably just lean on making their female lead misunderstood rather than capable of harm. And so I will stay hopeful, but expect most reviews will still be pulled from the indie or queer part of the pool. 

My Best Friend’s Honeymoon is a contemporary sapphic NB/f romance about a woman with a near pathological inability to make choices on her own behalf and the service top Daddy who has loved her since middle school. There’s definitely femdom here, though the overt part is eased into like someone slipping into a warm bath. You will be about three quarters into the book before they start discussing titles and half way in before it’s entirely clear who the dominant is. 

I don’t think that’s a bad thing. A lot of femdom bonks you over the head with how special and different and bossy the dominant is, something about them instantly flagging that people should yield to a Strong and Powerful Woman. This is contrary to the experience of being a dominant in real life, where you are generally just a person. 

The premise, otherwise, is that the sub character, Elsie (she/her), desperately needs to grow up. She’s so bad at asserting herself that she sleep walks her way nearly all the way to the altar in a marriage with a man that’s safe and sweet, but so oblivious to her own struggles that he’s tried to book out everything for their wedding as a surprise. When that blows up, in the extremely gentle breakup that follows he gifts her the planned and entirely non-refundable honeymoon. She decides to take her best friend Ginny (she/they, but represented as they/them), whose pining for her is something she likewise has elided around since they were 15.  

The thing I found most interesting is the novel nature of the dynamic. Ginny has a lodestone like desire to please their friend, but the book’s premise amounts to pushing Elsie way out of her comfort zone. This means Ginny refusing to ever anticipate or guess what Elsie wants and demanding she ask, explicitly and clearly. Via this system they eventually work their way to cunnilingus, fingering and fisting, with a stop off in some entirely consensual dirty talk. But for Elsie, all of these are high tension, pulling teeth level confessions, even starting by choosing what holiday activities to do at the resort first. 

This is really well done, and the tension of awarding someone the possibility of offering someone anything they want to make them squirm with the struggle of admitting they want it. Where it suffers is probably that while Ginny is more or less a saint, a part time carpenter who takes in rescue dogs and charts a path for themselves in a world that has been less than accepting… Elsie’s kind of an asshole without much else going on. 

Her choices, to put her head in the sand to try to get her fiancé to dump her, and to elide around Ginny’s teenage admission of interest, are set up as having plausible motivation, but there’s no examination in this sort of behavior being kind of hurtful. Elsie has spent her life enjoying casting other people as the problem. Her dad won’t listen to her plans to change the family hardware store, and she’s sidelined in her familial dynamic, but she’s never forced to consider her ideas might be bad. Derrick, her fiancé, won’t intuitively realize exactly what she wants but will still guess as best he can to treat her like what she acts like she wants with the limited information she’s given him and then she gets to look down on him. And Ginny’s pining, well, Elsie’s not entirely unaware of that either but it would require effort on her part to address it. Much easier to pretend they are just chosen lifelong sisters. 

The book is not entirely unaware about it. Like a lot of queer romances it does the thing of communicating everyone’s problems and the reasons for them in excruciating detail. (Very Tell versus Show) This includes having both leads feel ambivalent about how much it’s ok to mock Elsie’s gormless himbo ex-fiancé. But the trait of Elsie to essentially use refusing to assert herself overtly to get her way is pretty consistent. Sure she’s not thrilled about all the outcomes she gets, but time and time again a part of that is that she’s scared of not getting her way even more. 

Ginny repeatedly thinks about how Elsie could have dropped them as a friend in their teenage years, being described as pretty and popular to Ginny’s weirdness, or it lavishes praise that Elsie guards their pronouns the way nobody else will. It’s kind of sad, and sets up a bare minimum versus unconditional love situation. And unfortunately Elsie never quite comes down off that pedestal even during the books inevitable third act break up. 

At least it is framed that maybe Ginny is a smidge too attached, and the minute Elsie acts overtly cruel they are dropped like a hot rock. Then the leads separate and Ginny goes off and does what they are doing already but more so (carpentry, queer socializing, rescue dogs) and Elsie goes off and accidentally reminds the audience what a loser she is. 

That’s to say that Elsie, for all she is full of magnificent promise in Ginny’s eyes, has been working the cash register at the family hardware store since day 1, despite an associate’s degree in business, and sets her sights on finally killing her white whale: getting the sign in the store updated. Her big achievement is working up a new logo design (with an in text reminder Ginny is the graphic designer, not her) and convincing her father that they can add yellow to the design. Again perhaps the scene would not be so cringe if they hadn’t proudly thought-narrated that this was motivated by “color theory” that yellow was a happy color.

Dear reader, that is not how color theory works. But, if that wasn’t enough, reunited with Ginny at the book’s conclusion, Elsie is also excited to announce her plan to have Ginny and Ginny’s other friend Sue teach handy classes and make her dad record promotional Tiktoks. While I don’t think hosting lessons is the worst idea, the rest of this triumph is somewhat undercut by hints that this isn’t actually good plan.

The vibe that was being gone for here was Elsie coming into her own. The actual output is something more like this: https://youtu.be/sI1SLHEC98I?si=K0jrEJsJ7zhwb7y6

While I grant Ginny’s business plans also depend on making custom bondage furniture as much as home renovations, I find it less of a stretch that in a setting (Minneapolis) where the resistance is successfully being backed by a local sex shop. There’s probably not enough well heeled queer people to work referrals on this here, since this isn’t the universe of the Duke of Burgandy, but if the hardpoint market is finite, the need for tiling and drywall or new cabinets is not so limited.

Maybe this is also a bias here, not just because I have worked marketing jobs before and am used to bullshit, but also more personally. There’s a scene where Elsie scolds a staffer at the resort for calling them both Ladies and as someone who generally doesn’t like being addressed that way and is also a she/they, I got the ick. It is supposed to signify the true sincerity in Elsie’s heart, but instead it had more vibes of her tendency to prefer that aforementioned other-people-are-the-problem. And I think this is where it moves into weird my own reader hot buttons because I am also personally a little jaded about social justice defenders.

Nevermind the vibes of scolding the people with way less power than you (the waitress at a luxury tropical resort), there’s another thing that I kind of have as a personal red flag. If you are something considered unusual or marginalized there’s a particular kind of person who will gravitate to your orbit because they like that vibe of you being the squishy they can fight for. The trade off is that they expect constant infinite ally points, but also they can be an exhausting conflict farmer constantly dwelling on the manifold slights that you experience as a sort of vicarious humiliation. And then they make it their business to never let the subject lie and constantly try to drag these moments back to you.

That’s on me and my baggage. We can assume by author fiat that Ginny likes that sort of support as they react really positively to it, but I can’t help also bringing that scene together with another moment earlier in the story. One of the many things Elsie finds eye rolling about Derrick is that he is baffled that if Ginny says their pronouns are she/they, why the they is important to them. They is important to me too, but the distinction based on Ginny never using “she” for themselves is that the “she” here is being used as a compromise to elide around that awkwardness of being a non-binary person who still identifies with some aspects of femaleness. They are happy to associate with the term Dyke, but not a Lady.

It’s supposed to be a big breakthrough that Derrick later gets a therapist that he is using lots of they pronouns for. Tahdah, he got it! All I am actually left with is a vague sense Elsie is actually kind of shit at non-adversarial support for Ginny. This is probably just me being a hater due to my own baggage. And, credit where it is due, it seems to be a very consistent and not actually badly written. It’s actually extremely realistic, even as it makes me, the reader, side-eye the character.


And in support of my interpretation I think one must look at Elsie’s other major relationship. Derrick was supposed to represent the height of awkward allyship, well meaning, but more often than not cringe. But this is largely a perspective we get through Elsie, who shows other signs of being an unreliable narrator and who will distance herself from any problem she tries to fix. And, ultimately, someone who suffers from anxiety around being openly flagged as queer. Elsie says she is pansexual often enough that even very dim brained Derrick got it, but it’s kind of clear in her head narrative she sees Derrick as a straight relationship. Derrick doesn’t. Derrick is actually one step ahead in understanding that a queer relationship is any relationship with a queer person in it. He gets it more than she does, and happily ever after or not with Ginny, Elsie’s still going to have some work to do in how she places herself in a larger hierarchy. 

Still, one of the leads being disappointing as a person did not subtract from my overall appreciation of the book. The kink parts were solid, the sex scenes plausible and the deconstruction outside of a more stereotypical way of depicting D/s was refreshing. In aggregate I am really happy that I both bothered the poor clerk at Beguilded Books overtly for recommendations and that I have branched out of exclusively F/m. 

Where To Buy: 

Liked this review? Check out more titles in my 2026 Femdom Book Review Project!

“Deliver” by Pam Goodwin [Femdom Book Review]

by
Deliver by Pam Goodwin book cover, showing a man with bound wrists and intense green eyes

Completely breaking with tradition, this extremely dark romance starts an otherwise entirely M/f series off with a femdom couple. Liv is part of a criminal organization, the fantasy kind, that makes millions abducting and training people for sexual servitude. This was just supposed to be one more job for her, just another mind to break and body to twist to the needs of the future client. She’s learned to be hard, after going through the same process herself, and is ever aware of the lethal consequences for failure. It’s not just her life on the line, the organization takes hostages, promising death… or worse.

However, there’s something about her latest victim, the virginal football star and seminary student Joshua, that gets under her skin. His real submission, his goodness and their intense chemistry are throwing off her careful system. He’s supposed to be for the client.  She has plans to follow and people to protect, but it’s all too tempting to take him for herself.

As well as more traditional trigger warnings that are likely implied in the premise or mentioned on the author’s site, if any hint of bad things or the dominant character being put in a submissive position is a limit for you, you will want to skip this one. Liv spends much of the book at the mercy of the man who captured her originally, who still holds a twisted degree of power over her. She’ll break free eventually, but there will be lots of bleak scenes that reinforce Liv is not acting on her own initiative. The relationship between her and Joshua is a real matter of mutual attraction that eventually gets its happily ever after with her still his dominant, but this is not a straight forward power fantasy, it’s a lampshade, permitting us to ride along with evil acts while absolving the heroine for her part in them.

I think it also suffers from not always trusting the heroine to be impressed by the hero unless he can rhinohide and force some vulnerability out of her. Joshua resists to a degree that can sometimes be frustrating (Silver listening to my read along describes it as “rude!!!”). I also think the need to keep her redeemable pulled some punches that didn’t need pulling. It gives you some final act twists to further push that point of her actually being ok, but it probably could have just gotten by on those last bits alone.

Which, I suppose, also needs flagging that this is a deeply silly book. Real sex trafficking is not the plot of Taken, nor are such elaborate investments needed to put vulnerable individuals at the mercy of the wealthy and powerful. How things get resolved also requires a significant perspective shift on just how far the reach of the criminal organization was… but if you are reading a dark romance about kidnapping and then corrupting a virgin college linebacker you probably aren’t demanding detailed and plausible world building. There are moments where I giggled at what wasn’t supposed to be funny and “so bad its entertaining” parts, but the tin is clearly labled.

Besides, its nice to have a heroine who gets to dominate in a way that violates the hero’s consent, stay dominant and stay alive. Many stories will let things go dark, but they often do so at the cost of killing off the heroine, disempowering her, or at least having her end up alone. True, it does so by undermining her own capacity to be evil, but as an experiment on how to pull off the subject matter you could do worse. It’s almost a pity this seems to be the writer’s only foray into femdom because I wouldn’t have mind giving this another shot.

I will also say there’s a very conservative-side-of-true-crime vibe here, in so much that it’s been set in a sort of fantasy otherwise more familiar to the sort of person who warns you traffickers will leave a coin on your car to mark you for being later kidnapped. Nevertheless the hero, for all his gruff resistance, gets to be the hot objectified one and there’s a sort of Eurydice can take care of herself vibe from the heroine. There might be shades of QAnon here, but neither must we assume the writer thinks the world actually works that way. It’s just as plausible to take away that the silly parts make this less grim and exploitational than a more realistic account of how abuse goes down.

Where to Buy: The author actually offers this one for free on her site

“Green and Gold” by Gwendolyn Harper [Femdom Book Review]

by
Green and Gold: An Erotic Irish Fairytale by Gwendolyn Harper

When Sloane comes to stay in a small Irish village to care for her ailing grandfather, she attracts the attention of not one but two men. Liam, a local cab driver, and Darragh, a fairy king. These men may differ strongly in background, but they are united in one thing, the desperate desire to submit and serve her. The possibilities seem endless, but Sloane has to worry… can a girl maybe be a bit too lucky? (Spoilers: No, no she can’t)

I freely admit pulled this one out of the archive of my to be read pile based entirely on its thematic relevance to the month more so than anything else. And, I went into this with very low expectations as a result. St. Patrick’s Day, history of sectarian violence not withstanding, isn’t really much of a holiday. There’s green beer, green cake, and maybe some muddled imagery confusing four leaf clovers and shamrocks, alongside pots of gold and rainbows. The book has all hints of being at about the same depths. 

Nevertheless, Green And Gold  takes itself more seriously than a book about a three way femdom relationship with a Leprechaun might, and this makes it readable. It doesn’t rush the sex, and avoids describing people in terms of breasting boobily, or confining all activity to the bedroom. It’s cheesy, but the conceits like using the stoplight safeword system “green” regularly during play were more dad joke head shake worthy than tiresome. 

That being said, while it gives us some time to warm up to the protagonist, it never forgets this is a work of fetish porn. Most of the text is just a vicarious ride along of two consenting, but ultimately mundane BDSM relationships separately getting off the ground and eventually coming to mingle. Negotiations are made. Ideas are proposed. Kinky acts are done and go well. People orgasm. People are very grateful to each other. There’s a lot of mutual gratitude amidst the gratification, and a lot of declarations of affection, attraction and attachment. 

Otherwise, the protagonist, Sloane gets what she wants with minimal trouble. When challenges occur, they are always within her capacity to overcome them. The pattern follows that the heroine will identify a problem, worry a little and then the entire universe conspires with her to fix it. This might be more off-putting if it wasn’t part of the book’s larger premises, enjoying things being unfair in your favour. 

Findom, ironically, is one of the most taboo fetishes for all it enjoys a current state of popularity. There’s something about women openly and avariciously wanting things that attracts a particular social ire. This is the second romance novel I have read on the subject (review still pending), and while Preferential Treatment was about the complicated relationship poverty gives you to money, this is pages and pages of hungry receiving intermixed with more traditional femdom activities. This one doesn’t want to tug your heart strings or play on your guilt over wanting things. Green and Gold just wants your mouth to water as you imagine getting anything you could possibly buy with a credit card, while the most handsome man in the world is so happy for you he has an erection. 

Likewise, the all too convenient manifestation of unicorn poly can similarly be understood through that lens. Wanting partners who are open to sharing, but conveniently only into you is also a taboo desire. Worried boyfriend #2 will be hurt that you didn’t tell him about your financial arrangement with your boss? Nope, he is just happy for you and thinks your boss is hot too.  Worried the faerie king with infinite resources will want another lover alongside you if you have an open relationship? Nope, he cheerfully admits he doesn’t really have any other options anyway, so everything comes up you shaped. 

Of course there’s a trade off that by having few problems there’s not a lot of substance where the men are involved. One has a stressful job, the other one has… his sister’s cat to look after? But, once more the reader is being freed from a hint of tension. Two perfect boyfriends with almost no baggage! If you don’t have cat allergies and don’t mind the occasional mystical jet lagged lover needing to be put to bed, the fantasy remains that the world shall revolve around you. Even your mildest problems are merely opportunities to win and be praised, or anxiety you can release after receiving unconditional reassurance.

And in a reality where women can’t even masturbate without some bright bulb writing earnest essays that our sexual fantasies aren’t morally affirming enough, there’s something particularly transgressive about that naked display of unpunished greed. I personally tend to prefer a sharper edge to my fiction, but sometimes you want something that’s the literary equivalent of eating a jar of cake frosting. 

Where to buy: Author site

The Sea Witch by Katee Roberts [Femdom Book Review]

by
The Sea Witch by Katee Roberts A Wicked Villains Novel

Despite being published, hardcover and bought by me at Beguilded Books, The Sea Witch is a shameless #AUMafia #Fairytale #OlympicGods F/mf fanfic, with no pretense its leads, Zurielle, Ursa and Alaric, aren’t cribbed directly from the Disney version of themselves. It’s here to deliver up a bunch of group sex scenes and intermittent impact play, with a bonus side of virginity auction and secret kinky crime families. Nevertheless, I maintain the belief that there’s no premise too silly or formulaic that it cannot be saved by good writing. I like F/fm. My own personal tastes and expression of my asexuality end up coming out in practice as a sort of bisexuality, and sapphic, menage or not, is one of the places it is much easier to find femdom.

Unfortunately this one was a slog, leaving me skimming the sex scenes and taking not even smug schadenfreude flavoured so-bad-its-good pleasure as it shoehorns in the worst parts of Mafia romance, fairytale retellings and secret BDSM society stories. Worse than being particularly offensive, it was boring.

Of course I have no pity for Disney being borrowed from. That corporation has injected itself in virtually anything public domain shaped, and premises like Once Upon a Time and the Kingdom Hearts game series establish world building where all the bits and pieces of their version of things interact is open to reimagining. The fact that in a better world our folklore wouldn’t all be filtered through the Mouse can be balanced that stealing is important for reimagining them back into collective ownership. But, here the parts that were clearly Disney shaped were invasive as hell, a sort of smug mugging moment where almost every background character was reminding you who they were by their barely changed names. Except when they weren’t changed at all, the logic of who did or didn’t get altered itself a bit hard to follow.

Greek myth was universally under their original names. Hades, Megara and Hercules are in another triad (though Hades having any opinion at all on Hercules being an another artifact of Disney). Aurora, we are informed, has hair shifting between pink and blue (Disney again), but she has a thing with the crime boss Malone. For some reason Jamine and Jafar get to keep their original names (even though they don’t get names in the original Aladdin), and are of course an item and also doing crime boss things, but we also needed to know about Gaeton, Beast and Isabelle off doing a sex show in a way that was really more like blatant ads for another book. That’s what most of the fac fic parts read like, characters doing cameos in the most ham handed sort of way. You know when an actor gets too successful in a particular role and you can’t help that intruding into their later parts? That’s what’s happening here. 

But sure, whatever, Robert needs to get paid and endless overlapping series are the order of the day. As I said, maybe this book might have been rescued on the strength of its kink or the strength of its plot. Ideally both.

Kept in perfect isolated innocence by her crime boss father, honeypot Alaric has lured her from shining Olympus to the dangerous Carver City, under the pretext that he’s trapped in debt bondage to Hades. To raise the money to free him she immediately goes to her father’s enemy, Ursa, for a solution to raise the money. That solution is to auction her virginity. The result is that she somehow ends up in Ursa’s penthouse alternately sulking and orgasming. As it turns out this is a set up. Alaric and Ursa are an item, and this is really just part of Ursa’s revenge scheme against Zurielle’s father.

As far as the femdom elements, most of this is focused on Zurielle having a four day sexual awakening as a sub. The b-plot is the titular Sea Witch using this foray into unicorn poly to bridge a trust gap between herself and her more longer term sub partner, Alaric, but ultimately this is also about her coming to decide that Zurielle is indispensable as well. Ursa dominates everyone, Alaric alternates between light dominance of Zurielle and being treated as a sex toy Ursa uses on Zurielle. I should be able to enjoy this, and there are moments of Alaric’s submission to Ursa, both directly to her or when he is being wielded on Zurielle where I thought this had promise.

I think where things went wrong is an inconsistent handling of the darker parts of the story. It’s one of the most obnoxious habits of BDSM romances, when it comes to consent versus conflict, to try to have their cake and eat it too. Plots must set up a scenario where the characters are in peril, use the symbolism of BDSM to further add a sense of danger, and then every three pages have the characters confirm they are consenting even when nothing about the setup wants that to be implied. The result is much like the habit of barely legal porn to have the lead shriek, every so often “I am only 18!” This is largely for the benefit of the censors. 

Meme: The myth of consensual sex. A couple agree they consent, but jesus doesn't
Basically, all creative fiction has to be published like you are considering this scenario.

I like non-con. I think these are fictional characters, and eternally link back to that tumblr essay about diagetic versus non-diagetic BDSM. But I do not live in a world that’s friendly to this sort of approach. 

Historically, you cannot openly sell non-con BDSM as non-con BDSM. At best it needs to be erotic horror or erotic thrillers, providing a Hays Code style figleaf like True Crime does that lets you wallow in darkness as long as the text provides not one whiff of a happy ending. Or, in romance it needs to be passed off with a sort of surreptitious don’t ask don’t tell where you absolutely refuse to acknowledge anyone is getting raped or this is being done for audience titillation. Flagging it as BDSM is a no-no, because you can rip a bodice, tie up a character, or kidnap them, but heaven forfend anyone admit they get off about that part. You can’t even just tag it with the nonos and assume the reader will understand fiction, because even that level of admission can be enough to get you in trouble. You at best have to host trigger warnings on an author site.

As a result, everything that gets sold is done so under the Eye of Sauron level terror of either the credit card processors or some country’s only vaguely dormant obscenity laws will lash out and not only drag that work into the bowels of hell, but the author, publisher, retailer and the other authors too. Along with their bank accounts. 

The result is that Zurielle needs to remind us she’s participating with the ability to say no. Scenes open with the ritual repeat of safewords. Worldbuilding is used to show how safety mechanisms have been put in place. Everything should be fine, since after all everyone’s an adult and had been interviewed and their ability to change their mind discussed.

…Except everyone involved in the facilitation of Zurielle’s adventures is a murderous crime boss, or related to one. Ursa’s called The Sea Witch because she drowns people. Hades, who sets up an elaborate escrow system that is supposed to preserve Zurielle’s ability to opt out, is also holding Alaric in plausible enough debt bondage he can’t simply leave his job as a pro-sub. When someone actually spirits a clearly consenting Zurielle away from the people who bought her, that person is understood to face a dire (if horny) punishment. The stakes of everyone’s hijinks are a risk of at least nameless side characters dying in gang war.

Efforts to make a distinction about the Real Bad Guys falls flat too. By book end, everyone agrees that Carver City is not as bad as Olympus because *they* don’t do human trafficking. In the middle of their human trafficking operation. Thus Zurielle’s father’s business is enough to be considered a bridge too far for Zurielle, but at the same time Ursa’s vengeance is being sought because she was edged out of that business. A bit of fussing is done by Zurielle about still being okay with all these crimes, but her conclusion is that her actual moral qualms can be satisfied by knowing that Ursa says she’s not that bad.

This is somewhat of a tragedy because rather than talking about consent in any sort of nuanced way you get this sort of outcome. It’s consent theatre, rather than good consent practice, but it is being passed off as the real thing enough to pass the censorship of bodies who neither understand nor care about actual consent. Of course combating that’s a lot to expect from an unassuming Disney menage BDSM romance. If you are looking just for that aforementioned femdom threeway where she bosses a male and female sub to fuck at her direction or you really, really needed an Ursula/Eric tentacle dildo pegging scenario you will get what you are looking for. For anything more than that, the best I can say is that this book getting not 1 but 2 updated, increasingly professional covers and a fancy hardcover at least means people are buying enough femdom for the author to think it’s worth it.

Where to Buy: Author’s Website