This is a generally good role reversal noir action story with a disappointing last quarter when the author seems to remember that she’s writing Omegaverse and it’s somehow obligatory to drop a pile of additional love interests so the main couple can be part of a pack. Thus, what was about an aggressive badass who takes pity on a pretty man in distress, very much in the spirit of the noir part, sort of sputters out just as you were expecting the usual HEA that romance delivers.
Adam and Eve, our protagonists, both don’t want the complication and risk of having a mate, but when they have to go on the run together, they come to see that they are each other’s exception. The story itself isn’t that unusual, as a gruff assassin turned bodyguard with plucky, but damaged dame/former target being hunted has been a trope for centuries. The unique spin was the way that the Omegaverse aspect of the setting simplifies the role reversal. Both could still be their respective genders, but leave off whatever parts you don’t want. She can be taciturn and standoffish, and he can be vulnerable and alluring without requiring this to be too exceptional. But, just when they start to crack and come together as a couple, voila, random other dudes in a perfectly-functional-without-the-protagonists group. It’s is trying for reverse harem, yet ends like it doesn’t trust that an Alpha Woman can be perfectly satisfied to end in a dominant role.
Making things worse on the romance front, there is no chemistry with these extra people and they appear virtually out of left field, speed running into bed. I think the intent was to show how safe the protagonists were going to be with more people to rely on, but the extras feel more like one of those alt communes with compulsory swinging than an instant family. This is a terrible pity, as the pack is supposed to serve as a sort of narrative chorus to try to emphasize that the protagonist, Eve should stop being a such a self reliant lone wolf. Specifically, she mistakes them for a better place to leave Adam while she returns to her solo and possibly fatal ways. But she didn’t need to fuck these people to get that point across, and neither did they do much to compliment resolving the male lead’s own distrust of occupying his fraught role as an Omega.
The discordance of the rest of the pack being added is made all the more awkward by the male lead, Adam, being named in such a paired fashion with Eve. Nothing about this book is built to be an actual reverse harem romance, and I honestly think Moon is probably a victim of the series formula here. This is book six, four of which are female omega/plural male alpha heavy (with a few male betas for spice) and the fifth was male omega/female omega with the conflict being about the former accepting her compulsory harem if he wanted to be with her. As with the usual problems of putting the femdom at the ass end of the series, Bad Alpha is a monogamous romance shoehorned into a poly, reverse mostly male dominant setting.
And really, it didn’t have to be that way. The Omegaverse, a byproduct of slash fanfic, started as an m/m way to still explore things like pregnancy, it has its own tropes and rules, but nothing is hard and fast. And not all Omegaverse stories are harems or poly packs, and it’s not hard to find F/f, M/f or M/m where it’s just about that couple. Of course poly romances can and do work, but this one clearly wasn’t and tried to do that anyway to its own detriment.
Plus, it undoes something else. While most of the books Moon wrote in this setting are about a group of dudes who love each other and their magic girl, the remaining high m/m and M/m quotient make male omegas normalized. Eve’s place in the setting also suffers from the general implication that being a female alpha is exceptional. When you try to toss her into the alpha/alpha fuck pile and you completely muff the chemistry and point for the other guys to be there, what was largely a female gaze fantasy of watching two dudes fuck just ends up further undermining her. Dominance and grudgingly accepting vanilla/primal sex might be good for you just aren’t that compatible.
That’s not to say there wasn’t parts of this that weren’t good, it’s just that the parts that were bad were so awkward that they leave you wanting to pretend they didn’t happen. You can skim them, and miss nothing important to the main story, but nevertheless they are still there.
“Sharyn Ferns” or just Ferns, as they are known to the internet, is an lioness of the Lifestyle Femdom Revolution of the late aughts and 2010s. These days, that seems absurdly dramatic to say it happened. Young kinksters make Mommy or femboy jokes with casual comfort. Whole forums are dedicated to a squintillion facets of how to femdom with thousands of members able to drill down and look for what they want. Mainstream romance groups periodically demand more representation.
And while censorship is threatening all that has been built, we have never had it so good, thanks in no small part to this person.
Before, there was a time when ideas that femdom could be anything other than a strict fetish dominatrix being paid or that anything vaguely male and submissive could be attractive to a woman were both radical even among niche libertine pockets of the world. Gentle Femdom was a novel idea. Wearing your pajamas to play was an act of surprisingly scandalous rebellion.
But, then things started to change. Tumblr had glorious indie porn, Fetlife had thriving discussion groups and most information about kink was disseminated through blogs. People pushed back on the status quo, sharing, arguing and creating. Ferns was a part of all this, stalwartly managing various bickering groups and sharing her journey on first a blog and then later a podcast. If you are under the age of 30 and into Femdom with partners outside of a professional context, even if you don’t know her or of her, you have probably been influenced by her work.
A huge part of that was making information more accessible, and working on improving representation. Her short read guide books remain a great introduction to the how to part, while her collated anthologies of Happy Femdom Stories are of enormous importance in recording the words of people who are seldom otherwise allowed to share their world. Domme Chronicles, on the other hand, is her story, and as much an important part of her achievements as her support of others in pursuing personal fulfillment.
That being said, when the book came out circa 2013 and review copies were being handed out, my rather exacting approach to review made me a poor fit. What this is to the author is less a commercial endeavor and more an act of extreme vulnerability. It is published in the spirit of that old poem:
“I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
W.B. Yeats, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, 1899
So, how to describe this book, then, over a decade later? It is a collection of short, really bordering on flash fiction erotica. No, that’s not enough to sum it up. It’s a raw ripped open glimpse of hunger and hope.
Ferns gives you a full immersion of the sensation of desire where sadism and adoration are so tangled up in each other that the sub becomes an elusive ideal, hunted, and to simultaneously be had and consumed. It’s the caught breath when your lover does something that just clicks in your brain and shoots straight down your spinal cord into arousal so intense it’s an act of masochism to feel it and something transcendental all at once.
Ferns made her blog about the surprisingly mundane, discussing the functional bones of relationships, the gripes of her cohort and the mundanities of life. For an activity treated as the lewdest of lewd like BDSM, there’s very little sex in most of what she’s written there. Not this book. That’s where the metaphorical clothes come off.
And while the majority of it is intensely loving, almost worshipful in the presentation of how impressed her nameless partner(s) can make her, and the pieces could be read as stand alones, the back and forth is telling a larger story that allows it to carry along the darker bits. For example, nestled amidst multiple paens to the pleasure of a beloved partner coming home is a savage fantasy that can only exist in that context of the imaginary, of murder. Alongside a dozen or more likely real life stories of things going very well is a little memory of a first time going very right at a BDSM club, where by all measure they shouldn’t have. It’s a very unsafe story of being flung well out of your depth and swimming despite a world that set you up to sink.
Contrast here is important to the work as a whole, with the softer bits almost serving as protective padding to the metaphorical knives. Nothing is particularly very long, but some things are very sharp.
I think, also, in reading this it might be helpful to realize they are designed with another intentional aspect. The stories’ short (often almost abrupt) length and prose structure makes them read aloud ready. There’s no narrative of a single character here, indeed nobody has any names and it’s never clear how many different subs, real or imaginary, are being talked about. But that’s rather the point, as this is her voice, and ultimately about being allowed to want things.
Oh no, it’s dreadful. There’s no redeeming moment or characters here, and it slides into him dominating her by the middle of the book, after a captivity segment that was tedious and free of any sort of enjoyable tension. And it’s not like the writer doesn’t know it, we even finish with an author’s note this is early career and they don’t think it’s very good.
The original Snow Queen is a lovely fable about a girl (Gerda) on an adventure to rescue her childhood friend, one that feels ancient without being actually all that old, dreamy, sharp and with a brutal edge lurking in the background. Gannon’s Snow Queen trying for an endearing villainess romance retelling, but mostly manages to replicate the experience of a creepy fantasy wanker in your inbox asking you to help him try out femdom and calls you Mommy without your consent. Before sliding into the even more annoying idea that dominant women want to be called good girl all along.
To accomplish this, the character of Kai goes from an urban dweller twisted by a shard of a beauty distorted mirror in his eye, to an immensely ham-fisted depiction of a neurodivergent person in a small village. He is still selfish, but rather than a remote coldness, now he impotently gets into trouble by making everyone’s lives harder, while we are supposed to think he is sympathetic were it not for being awkward. Gerda is now his sister, head shakingly tired of his antics, as is everyone else in the village.
Otherwise the theme is uwu cutsie, and peppered with modern references in an otherwise fairytale pastoral. The Snow Queen is significantly defanged to merely making threats, even an assassination attempt just being brushed off with a bit of thumping. She’s no longer an icy, fae like personification of winter, but the new sorcerer-monarch whose reign has been marked by complete disinterest in ruling due to her sulking. She started when she was 16, has ruled for 30 years and is written as if she got stuck at the age she started.
This is what powerful women need, to be proven as not as scary and humanized. Clearly.
Meanwhile, within day 2 of his captivity Kai is making pancakes and getting in trouble for starting fires without permission, has agreed with the Snow Queen that people in his village should be murdered, and is otherwise doing the usual gothic beauty and the beast retelling shit of offending the grump while befriending her talking animal minion. To justify his durance in the Snow Queen’s custody, this version’s Kai has to reassemble a shattered artifact the villagers broke. Which he is good at, but still bad at everything else. How bad he is at everything is being milked for comedy, and the more that teat is squeezed the more aware you get this is about as productive as milking a bull. Which is to say eventually painful.
The intent is that we are supposed to see her won over by his good heart. The reality is that actually the evil village Council member “Derriks” almost immediately becomes the most sympathetic character. He has tried to rebel against the Snow Queen with violence, but the narrative lets us know diplomacy has failed and the Snow Queen’s neglect is killing the village. His dialogue is cartoonish but deeply unfunny, yet ten minutes with the other characters you can see why he got voted in. Through his eyes we learn the hero, Kai, spends most of his time drunk, or wasting your time with poorly done presentations about how he is going to totally find artifacts that will return the village into a tourism hotspot.
I think we are supposed to take it, as a modern audience, that archeology is a worthwhile pursuit. Kai imagines if he can just uncover the early history of the village a place we have established is shit to do shipping through will suddenly host all sorts of visitors who want to see ancient but mundane relics. The book does a pretty good job of convincing us this isn’t the case, regardless of what the author intended. Kai not only bores and annoys the villagers, he bores and annoys me. When bad guy Derriks fantasizes about throwing him into the harbour, rather than emphasizing the character’s villainy, the main feeling I get is sympathy.
Even more damningly, the narrative gives us no explanation of how Kai got so good at archeology, which is incredibly lazy writing. You can do a neurodivergent awkward professor type character well, with the right grounding, but the text spends more time introducing Kai’s head of resentment that he isn’t special than it does anything else about him. He is an entitled ass with nothing to justify it. Not even to us. It would have taken absolutely not effort to sketch out any sort of self taught back story or demonstration of a technique better than digging up the local town square at random (yes, really) but the book prefers to spend its effort on interminable whining from Kai about how he isn’t even short or ugly, just average.
His attitude and treatment of the titular Snow Queen isn’t much better. It’s ironic that evil Derriks is depicted that way via having him leer over Kai’s sister, because that’s exactly what Kai does the moment he meets our female lead. Brooding mostly silent heroines of great potential violence are, themselves, not bad tropes, but we really lose something here by not getting her perspective until a quarter of the way into the book. When we do it’s even more disappointing. Apparently despite lots of emphasis there’s nothing remarkable about Kai, the Snow Queen immediately thought he was hot.
Unfortunately, while there’s a half hearted attempt at the trope of melting your dominant’s frozen heart, the cozy/comedy aspect of the story constantly undermines things with Kai’s cringe banter. It’s not funny, it’s a jerk finally reaching a point someone can stop him continuing to not take things seriously. Confrontations with the Snow Queen are tedious and frivolous, for example he is as concerned with disliking the soup as much as not getting to work on the project properly. This was written in 2013, there’s not even the start of a “it was a different time” argument here.
Of course in addition to displaying 0 respect for the female lead, he instantly puts his mind to determining if she is single, and because of the plot she also finds him inexplicably adorable. All while her wolf minion irreverently makes little comments to remove any remaining mystique. While there’s probably a clear overlap here with Disney’s Frozen for the book’s publication (also 2013) for the choice of the subject, it’s an achievement to manage a botched retelling where Kai is even more made the center of the universe than the nonsense Disney inflicted.
I think as far as failing its tension, in addition to just plain bad writing, this is a problem role reversal occasionally finds itself in where sexism plus fretting about the right kind of consent lead to a complete and repulsive defanging. The captivity plot is pure gender flip, but since the rest of the world is leering male counselors and Kai consistently treats her with the same disrespect he approaches everyone else, the impact is closer to a very specific male fantasy.
That one is that a sparkling perfect magical woman will see him, the saddest of sad sack schlubs, as a diamond in the rough. Her dominant aura will do all the work to make him feel horny/submissive and she will transform him while falling hopelessly in love. As a submissive fantasy, sure, but I have yet to meet a dominant who sees gross incompetence as hot. Since the target audience here is women, this is even more baffling.
And then we get this line, after he discovers her real name. Said un-ironically.
“You should smile more.” He said finally. “It… it suits you.”
This is pretty much Kai through and through. Not why she doesn’t smile, but then she, like everything else in the universe, exists for him, the main character. Basically she’s that joke by Kate Beaton.
But weird gender dynamics aside, the other reason the book sucks is that it doesn’t respect its own narrative in favour of creating more opportunity for (failing at) clowning. During the pancakes scene we are told Kai, who is a cook at his family tavern, can actually make edible food. Despite this, the book wants to have a funny kitchen disaster some time later, and settles on him not knowing the difference between oil and vinegar when he fails at making lunch. This is despite being previously told he could cook reasonably well in a proper kitchen. The author just wanted to have a getting to know you kitchen scene where he gets to be a quirky screwball.
And of course the person he is supposed playing off doesn’t fit the role she’s been assigned either. She is treated like she’s the rules follower to his chaos, but the rest of the book has already established the Snow Queen is shirking responsibility and not particularly rules bound herself. The sub-genre might have dynamics like it was trying for enough people might expect it, but the book is lazy and poorly edited enough to ram this level of randomness into the text without backing it up.
The least said about the deeply unfunny random heroes who attack the better. Joke wasn’t good, characters added nothing. Tonally this feels like runtime padding. However, having fucked around enough to reach the middle of the book and to establish the characters are on speaking terms we abruptly switch to them having terrible sex where he rips her clothes off (destroying them) and tells her that he doesn’t have to listen to her and he is too good at sex for her to correct him. Kai, king of the losers, with no information for the audience about his past experience, is a sexual savant.
Then the artifact is fixed, the village rejoices and he then dominates her while she’s tied up with chains of ice. It’s not a good sex scene either. This is about as erotic as calling the tax office to make a correction.
That that’s just 60% in. The rest is more time wasting wank, unfunny banter, and no stakes confrontations with councilman Derriks. A happy ending is achieved, Kai gets everything he wants. The Snow Queen is slavishly devoted to him and he gets to enjoy a badass is at his beck and call and being special. The last part of this book was read with a fixed disgusted expression, all charity gone. If this wasn’t for review I would habe DNF’d ages ago.
Yuck. Who is this for? About the only thing this book serves to do is encourage you that if you worry you aren’t good enough for publishing to do it anyway. If this shit got 4.4 stars out of 167 reviews, your personal pet project can’t possibly be worse.
One of the hardest parts of this project remains that books with femdom in them are poorly labeled, giving you little warning about what you are getting into. It’s only recently that romance.io even made a distinction between “fem-dom” (do not ask me why they think it needed a hyphen) and general “BDSM” as a tag, and otherwise we are stuck with recommendations and trying to judge books by their proverbial covers. When is a “take charge” heroine code for one who merely shows a modicum of competence, and when is it signaling and will grab the hero by the literal balls?
At the same time, it usually takes me a couple of days of focused attention to read a novel length book, and at a weekly review schedule that means that it’s perfectly possible to pick a book that *might* be potentially worth it and come away bleakly disappointed. Which, for pleasure reading is just part of the experience, but for my (self imposed) deadline eats into time I could spend on something I know definitely at least meets criteria of having femdom. That inversely is at odds with my other hope with this project, to expand the pool of searchable works beyond the same handful of titles getting recommended over and over. But if I find a dud and other people thought it was femdom I am at least doing a public service by calling attention to a false flag.
Inversely, I am not sure how much people want to read 600 to 1000 words of “Pearl had a hunch based on the ghost of a hint and was wrong”. And you really can’t tell. You would think a work like Her Bridegroom Bought And Paid For would have delivered, but that one was rather Alphahole male dom. This is a game of roulette with both my time and exposure to squick.
Captured, therefore, was a big risk only made possible by slotting reading it into what was supposed to be fun time not review time. Having found Daughter of the Blood an unpleasant read, and stumbling on a thread of books that inverted the trope of a Princess being given to a Barbarian to a Barbarian being given to a Princess, I gave it a careful look over in case anything popped out. Most of the titles suggested were the usual he men alpha shocks priss who then surrenders to his aura of erotic menace, but on the list was Forbidden by Helen Kirkman, promising to be a princess and slave. The male lead was in chains on the cover. So I tried to find a copy.
Only Kirkman is a now obscure, trad published (Harlequin) historical author who seemed to stop writing in the late aughts. The best even behemoths like Amazon can do is help you buy you a second-hand paperback from a third party. You cannot buy her work as an e-book, at least through any search engine I tried. And yet, I gave it a shot in my library catalogue and found not my goal but another captive male romance by her later in the series Captured. It was free, so why not? I could always just DNF and it was Sunday night so I had time to grab a more reliable replacement if I had to.
I say all this to let you know how low my expectations were going in. Reader, I inhaled the damn thing that night, staying up until midnight to finish it. I liked it. I liked the dynamic, the setting, the plot, even the purple prose sex scenes where everything is a bit discombobulated and dream-like.
As for what you get: It’s England in the 700s, a period when everything was a fractured bunch of smaller tribal groups and you could find three absolute kings in what is now day trip driving distance. This may be a tough setting to jump into for people whose preference for historicals leans more to the restrained and familiar Regency period, but for someone whose parents met through the SCA, the deep cuts of the cultural roots of the UK are my happy place.
Princess Rosamund is living in a Viking camp after being handed to them by her Mercian Royal relatives as a bargaining tool. Things have not gone well. The Viking are plundering their way through Wessex, and just brutally murdered a bunch of hostages so that they can keep doing that. Rosamund, knowing this will not end well one way or another, is looking to get the hell out of here with the money she has squirreled away being the favoured mistress of one of the ranking members of the group. And then she stumbles upon Boda, a battered, chained and unconscious captive in the hands of the guy who personally carried out the killing of the hostages. Rosamund takes one look at his helpless body (and red hair) and is smitten. She assertively wins the guy in a game of dice and hauls him back to her tent.
She then waits until he is conscious to have her way with him, in a dramatic and immediate escalation. I had been extremely worried that the books genre and time period would mean things would go the way things usually do, where the captive male lead (restrained or not) terrorizes the heroine with his erotic assertions. But, while there’s a brief point where he tries to assert himself, it isn’t via sexual assault to put her in her place or some such, and Rosamund takes control again by giving him a handjob she is very clearly enjoying, both the act itself and the knowledge she has the literal upper hand in her skill at seduction.
The book also takes advantage of her understood profession as a camp follower to give her lots of dialogue about just wanting the captive as her bed warmer. We do not need her to be a virgin he opens to pleasures she has never known, or coy about this or her immense sexual confidence. While Rosamund’s not exactly happy about having been handed over to Vikings, she’s been thriving about as much anyone can, with remarkable savoire faire.
But all isn’t as it seems. Boda is an escaped slave-convict from the peasantry of Mercia, rough speaking and working as a mercenary for Wessex, but his capture is no mere chance. Meanwhile, cultured refined Rosamund is hiding a secret of her own. Nevertheless they both have their own reasons to be unwilling to return to Mercia and Boda agrees that when the time is right he will help her and her teenage maid Merriwen escape.
Merriwen is one of the other things that adds charm to the book. With everyone’s perception she is “simple” you get what would be more accurate to a describe as an autistic person who has been accidentally infantilized due to people underestimating her capacity to function. Now 16, Merriwen will do some things that cause problems for our leads, but these make sense once you know who Merriwen really is and compare how she is being treated. Honourable mention also goes to the way two side characters, Olga, another camp follower, and Od, one of the minions of the book’s villain, are handled. Both could have been depicted as one dimensional, the bad sex worker to contrast with the virtuous heroine, and the superstitious mini-boss to be overcome.
Of course you are probably mostly wondering about the femdom, and what I would say is that you have is a combo of plot conveniently giving some fetish fodder (whump, bondage) and structural explorations of fealty that dovetail nicely with maintaining Rosamund’s power even into book end. This is another place to see handled well, particularly more than just “well you won’t have any more real world power any more, but let’s be kinky still” is usually as good as it gets.
Working in service to this conclusion is Boda’s massive childhood trauma. He has deeply internalized his lowly status, not just peasant but the tier below it, as a thrall pushed into that status by his father’s crimes. Thus the other obstacle in the characters’ way, outside of the primary issue of marauding Vikings and medieval war crimes, is his ambivalence about accepting rewards for his exemplary military performance that would raise his rank. He has already turned them down once, and Rosamund, regardless of the real truth about her, is a noble. Despite her clear and straightforward interest in him and repeatedly pointing out absolutely 0 people would successfully prosecute a war hero in a completely different kingdom for being an escaped slave, he’s all set to throw away their HEA based on not being good enough for her.
The resolution of that is deeply satisfying and narratively consistent to that concept of fealty. After receiving lands and status as a reward for various heroics, he passes them all to her. He will marry her, yes, but she has to be the head of their household. While it also turns out she was correct and the risks of his dark past putting him in trouble is him wildly blowing things out of proportion, their respective roles with each other remain in a way they both find works for them. Even no longer a slave, they are able to turn the dynamics of fealty and of knight and lady into a very satisfyingly implied FLR.
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Where to buy:
Look for copies on places like thriftbooks.com or check your local library because this one is a hard to find gem.
