Update: This is a very old review. While I personally found this book fairly readable, I will caveat that it’s very low on the power exchange and the plot largely focuses on male shame around having a specific fetish and connecting through releasing that shame. It also has a MAJOR weight loss based theme for the female lead that needs specific trigger warnings.
Wanna know how you can take the tropes and rules of the genre of romance and make a well realized self discovery setting with flawed but pleasant characters, and write a femdom story that is believable? Tired of erotica aimed at sub men and looking for something written to please a female dominant?
Unbound, by Cara McKenna is one of my more pleasant surprises for 2016. Holy shit, is it a tightly little packaged example of a good, realistic femdom romance. You know how you really want something to exist, and you bemoan that you can’t seem to find it, and BAM, there it is, better than anything you could write?
I have a moderate romance novel habit, usually enjoying the so-bad-its-good and the occasional just plain good read as I do my daily commute to and from work. I’m usually a big fan of historicals, but Amazon gave this to me as a suggested read. Judging a book by its cover, it’s another shirtless headless dude with a vaguely kink hinting title, and I admit I was all prepared to hate read my way through a hideous M/f train wreck someone dashed off to pay the internet bill. I admit I am a snarky, mean reader. Then by a few pages in the author managed to make me go from predatory reviewer to tentatively intrigued:
There’s nothing in summary to make you expect something different. Our heroine, Merry, is off to do a hiking adventure in the Scottish Highlands. She’s recently lost her mother and a significant amount of weight, and is dealing with the ramifications of that. This is the first sign that we’re in for an actual treat- while most books handle weight loss like a Cinderella transformation, Merry is dealing with all the realities- loose skin, changed relationship with people that’s a mixed blessing, and trying to bend her mind around a healthy relationship with herself and her body. Rather than glamour, she’s feeling alienated from her identity as the fun fat girl- her long term FWB dumped her and she’s having to re-examine both her friendships and her relationships with herself. Then her swimming in a Scottish lake gives her dysentery.
In a writing genre where beleaguered heroines get dainty fevers and miraculously limited concussions, I’ll give the story props for going there. The narrative about as coy as the POV would give about the symptoms, but weak and fainty, she ends up on the doorstep of a local hermit, a guy with a Dark Past (TM). Our hero, Rob, is an alcoholic who deals with his problem by getting away from society. Oh, and he’s a pervert.
The book teases you, taking a slow burn approach to all things sexual, and I was all prepped to pout a little when it was revealed that he was a Secret Dominant who was going to Teach Her To Love Her Body Through Submission, when once again the book surprised me. Rob is a sub with a thing for scratchy rope. And Merry, who hails from the west coast fashion industry is fully aware of kink things and doesn’t miss a beat. Repressed and British bloke meets a woman whose backstory is a baby born of a gay man and a single-by-choice hippy mother. She’s not only cool with it, it doesn’t occur to her that he’s odd.
You know how rare it is to find writing that really gets it? That recognizes the pure joy that’s in the dominant side for women? Or that clues in how desirable a sub guy can make you feel? I won’t get too spoiler heavy, but these characters manage to connect on multiple levels, both zingy chemistry, and no sense that the demons they battle are pure dramatic padding. And my goodness, it’s good to have a sub guy be written as a delicious piece of fuck meat, and a dominant heroine not have to use the proxy of Mistress AngryWhip to express herself.
One does not read romance to break free of comfortable formats- like watching baseball you go into it with expectations of the rules everyone is operating under. Consider this a perfect play, from someone who knows her genre well and knows how to speak through it to make a very modern, approachable story that delivers the obligatory warm and fuzzies while managing depth of character.
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Yummy… Scotsmen always are a turn on! 😉 specially the fuck meat ones.
“Then her swimming in a Scottish lake gives her dysentery.”
*grumble* Our water is one of the cleanest in the world *grumble*
…and we don’t have lakes, so there!
/pouts
It was described as “loch” water and she wasn’t entirely sure.
You know, if you keep writing about things I absolutely have to go buy when I have no money, I’m gonna need to stop reading your blog 😛
Luckily I had a handy promotion code, and now I have a new awesome book 😀
Devoured this. Really good book. But, damnit Pearl, you set me up. Merry is a service top and the kink scenes are very clearly all about her filling a role and indulging Rob’s kink. If I hadn’t gone in expecting femdom I’d be ecstatic with this book. Now I’m feeling let down. Poo.
I disagree with the “not a dom” lable.
I am particularly evangelical about this, that one aspect of femdom that gets neglected compared to the fetish activities, is getting inside the sub’s head. Merry is a more fluid person (not explicitly a femdom by self identification) but an important part of her sexuality is expressed in taking the lead and opening him up.
I don’t think the pleasure is just in meeting his need, it’s in the power to take over someone through their fantasy.
I’d lie to agree, and she cearly enjoyed being able to drive him crazy. But the repeated referrences to her “indulging” him and the fact the way she responds when he talks about no woman putting up with his kinks for long–if she was enjoying the control and the kink in her own right, then why not say so? “I don’t know if I could do this forever, but I’m enjoying the kink too.” Instead she gives a kind of lame “I’m sure some woman out there…” If she had once said “I like the fetish stuff too, I’m not doing it just because you want it” I would have cheered. but that lack combined with to the “indulging” him comments?
I’ll agree she enjoys taking the lead, and enjoys the way he reacts to his fetishes. But while I’ll agree getting inside a subs head is a big part of femdom, I’ve known vanilla folk who enjoyed taking the lead, enjoyed getting their partner off and were good at getting inside their partners heads to give them pleasure. Dominance doesn’t require fetishes, but if she was controlling him out of a desire to please him, and not because controlling him pleased her, that says service top to me.
True! Romance novels have a bad habit of making the main focus be her excitement at his interest with less attention paid to her agency, overall, too.
I was really excited to read this on your recommendation, and I agree the kink parts were very good, but man I was so incredibly disappointed with the way the weight loss was handled. Some of that is on me for reading more into your summary than what was actually said, and coming back to it now I have to admit it’s pretty accurate, but to be honest I think you should add a trigger warning, because there is an extremely high amount of eating disorder triggers and fatphobia in this book.
I didn’t mind it so much in the first few chapters, because I thought this was the “before” state of our flawed heroine, and that her arc would include realizing not only the disastrous health effects of starvation, but also that she’d bought into a toxic culture that was causing her to mistreat the people around her, and that’s why her relationships were crumbling, not due to “jealousy” over her eating disorder. That isn’t what happened.
Not only does the book assume, against all real world evidence, that someone who is eating so little it ought to have stopped her period and started causing hair loss and inability to regulate body temperature, is going to be capable of swimming in frigid mountain lakes and hiking on her own in the back country, it shows the disordered behavior that led to this in graphic, triggering detail, which is treated as neutral to positive by the narrative.
She never regrets any of her poor treatment of her friends, or realizes that just because she currently fits the norm, doesn’t make that norm right or okay. The minute she becomes skinny, all sympathy or ally-ship with other fat people goes out the window, and the narrative treats this as a positive character development, and her friends dislike of being subjected to diet culture as irrational jealousy.
I would call the improvement which happens near the very end of the book token and unrealistic – for one thing, it never addresses that she would gain weight back very quickly once she stopped starving herself. We get a mild description of less disordered eating patterns, totally divorced from any context except a nebulous sense that Merry has learned to accept herself, somehow. Because she magically remains skinny, it remains unknown whether Rob would still be into her if her body reflected her new, healthier habits. The book goes out of its way to avoid any statement that could be misconstrued as thinking that fat bodies can ever be desirable or acceptable.
I wish the better version of this book where the author is self-aware that Merry is an asshole character existed, because I love a difficult, unlovable FMC who still isn’t perfect by the end. I honestly think that if her eating disorder and internalized and externalized fatphobia was used in a more thoughtful way, that I could have enjoyed Merry even if the bare facts of her story remained the same. I would have loved to see better parallels between her and Rob’s recovery stories, in the hands of a writer who understands that they’re equally messed up, and that Rob is ahead of Merry in some ways (accepting that he’s hurt people, that he was wrong and he’s responsible for that). The parallel of him being someone with a similarly accepting attitude about bodies (compared to Merry’s ‘yeah, what of it?’ outlook on kink) was *right* there – give him a more realistic functional build, and an appreciation of food as fuel, let her be a bit critical of his body in the beginning but learn to appreciate it as he cares for her, and have a little shame in the face of his kindness, and then have that be the key that starts her reflection on how her attitudes hurt and shortchange the people around her…. this book could have been so great, and it’s a shame that the author’s common prejudice got in the way of that.
I know this is a pretty critical comment, but I also wanted to say I love your review series and will continue to read things you recommend! The Damsel and Wooing the Witch Queen are next on my list, and I’m looking forward to them 🙂