contemporary romance

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

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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/

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

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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. 

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