I feel like this book’s curse is that it is trying to be Romantasy when it really isn’t. It’s an epilogue for the villain, after a trilogy that followed the main couple and an additional book for another side character pair. But, as other reviewers have noted, it’s extremely underbaked as far as creating much chemistry or plausible connection between the leads.
This is a real pity because it has moments of doing what it wants to accomplish, telling a whimsical and cozy story about a morally dark character’s redemption as he trades past abuse for a new family and finds love. You have a seaside town on the transition of fall to winter, a magical apothecary shop, two adorable urchins, a pretty, but sarcastic fop hero (Xander) and a nurturing but fiercely independent witch heroine (Evagaline). The femdom scenes themselves, are open door and realized with minimal caveats against the quality.
But as the fifth book in a series about romancing demon blooded warlocks, “Bound & Tide” suffers from two problems. It’s unable to be truly stand alone, with far too much on page time spent with the main character, Xander, talking about characters who have no real bearing on the current story, and the other half of the supposed romance, Evangeline, is essentially a sexy lamp.
While marketed as focusing on Xander’s unexpected attraction to someone he meets, the love story is there as an afterthought to a more standard series of DnD esque adventures focused on Xander. It’s technically dual point of view, but by the middle of the book Evangeline’s interiority has shrunk down to a few paragraphs of sulking and pining until Xander shows up again. Her plot, such that it is, is the storyline of a romanceable NPC, the sort of character who spends most of the time bolted to one location and requires the actual hero to solve her issues for her to unlock a series of cut scenes.
Indeed, much like the RPG format that informs the structure of this story usually makes side quests optional, you could have removed the whole romance from the story and nothing about Xander’s story would change. Those urchins are much more load bearing and have more resonance and meaning.
Matters are not helped by writing Xander as treating his prior love life as highly compartmentalized. Evangeline is immediately renamed “Red” in his head, something that is firmly emphasized as dehumanizing. For whatever reason Evagaline isn’t bothered by this, despite otherwise starting out as absurdly surly to the hero before she’s really had a chance to know why she should dislike him. In between Xander’s main quest he intermittently wanders back to her shop and annoys her until she arbitrarily suddenly decides to do femdom with him and then vanishes from importance. She comes up in Xander’s list of attachments when he has to think about it, but the vibe is pretty much that she otherwise only exists to him when he is horny/bored and lonely.
While there’s three major sex scenes, one primly cleaning and cunnilingus, one of tease and denial with bondage, and one extremely awkward scene of knifeplay, and the author leaves the characters with the implication they are now considering pegging in their happily ever after, these sex scenes say nothing to the character’s changing mental states. The knifeplay is particularly bewildering as we learn later that Xander, the blood mage, who cuts himself to do magic was trained to self harm at a very young age by his demon mother. This fact doesn’t cross Xander’s mind at all or have any connection even so much as to emphasize it’s different with her.
People who are desperate for on page femdom, any femdom, may enjoy this by skimming. I was merely left disappointed, as once again F/m is the ass end of series afterthought. And, alas, one always feels frustrated because then the book gets blamed that “nobody wants to read femdom” when the thing that was wrong with this book was the most vanilla part.
It feels like Caggaino can write individual scenes just fine but struggled to string them together or make them connected. I diagnose author burn out here, that scenario where you only have part of a story and you can’t make yourself slog through the bits you don’t care about. I think she wanted to wrap up what happened to this character after she finished the main series, but she didn’t actually have a full story to tell or one that was in the genre of the other books. However, since her audience expects consistency, we get this. I think she should have saved the hard work of her sex scenes for a couple with actual chemistry and probably left Xander’s story as an author bonus because really there’s not enough here for what she tried to do.
Where to Buy
Author’s Site
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