femdom romance book

“The Admiral’s Acquisition” by Luna Gold [Femdom Book Review]

by
The Admiral's Acquisition by Luna Gold F/m, Digetic & Non Digetic BDSM, Dub Con, Non-con, Fun plot, great characters #2026 Femdom Book Review Project

This one is another favourite, an 100% for dommes F/m delight about a gruff space admiral (Kira) and the ruggedly handsome slave (Mak) she rescues and then comes to love and appreciate. I think what I enjoy most about this book is that it’s not only completely focused on wish fulfillment, and not afraid to go absolutely off the deep end into the background grim, but that there’s a sort of amusing self awareness about things that bug dommes. Additionally, there’s enough plot and worldbuilding to keep things interesting between scenes of the characters making gooey eyes at each other and hopping into kink, so much so that even if this was somehow closed door I’d still find it fun. Gold tells a good swashbucking space yarn, but it also has the rare distinction of a character in a leadership role who is given a lot of on page time to show why they are a good leader. 

A lot of books don’t do that. Be it royalty or a titan of industry, the day to day of how the character is awesome is made as vague as possible. They might work long hours with paperwork, close amazing deals or be narrated as giving stirring speeches, but ultimately things are pretty handwaved or worse, gives rather the opposite impression. As a reader who has complained of other books with queens being all tiara, no tax policy; or that make the supposedly business savvy characters feel like failsons and saps, I can’t emphasize how much I enjoyed seeing Kira take charge thoughtfully.

It’s a workplace romance of sorts, where the workplace just happens to be a hypercapitalist libertarian, slave owning space dystopia and where BDSM is just the normal recreational activity. I am not even sure this society has a concept of vanilla, even among consenting parties. 

Otherwise, as far romances go, The Admiral’s Acquisition leans to incredibly horny insta-lust, with a very rapid escalation into sex and both diegetic and non-diegetic BDSM aplenty. Obviously you can expect a happily ever after, and this one does a pretty good job of letting the sub show they are useful without making them the main event. While the story is told from a dual perspective, it also has a very unusual technique of running scenes a second time through the viewpoint of the other character, rather than using the jumps between Kira and Mak just to advance the external plot. The effect is almost like when you play with someone and then you get them to run back with you how much they enjoyed it during aftercare. 

I flagged earlier that non-digetic BDSM makes a big part of the setting (and the resulting conflicts that follow from it). That’s worth an additional caveat for some readers that Kira will be threatened by odious coworkers (though she defends herself well) and nearly everyone in this universe is bisexual and very comfortable with public sex between any combo of genders, consenting or not. Kira is a bit of a stick in the mud for her society, and rejects what other people get up to, but if you don’t want to see male dominants with female subs, even depicted negatively, consider yourself forewarned. And if the idea of the book that almost immediately shows you a very graphic, on page M/m sexual assault is distressing, consider this flagged as well. Mak’s need for rescue is lingered on enough that it’s clear it’s there for titillation as much as extra emphasis. I liked this because I like the rougher stuff, you might not find that your cup of tea.

And, if you are a strict nothing but un-caveated consent person, ditto this might not work, because the power imbalance between the characters remains consistent even to the ending. Nevertheless, I think Gold’s emphasis on Kira being an actually good boss also helps here. It’s not just that she doesn’t whip her crew or do the other awful things villain characters are depicted getting up to, but she also sets crew up for success and independence, a mindset she’s clearly also applying to Mak. In the various ways we might try to tell a BDSM romance with non and dub con while still leaving the dominant character sympathetic, the twin tropes of “oops I accidentally a slave” and “my society is worse than me by comparison” remain the most tried and true ways to gently elide around the reader’s sensible moral scruples and let one just be indulged by a fantasy. This, in itself, is nothing new, but Gold does a good job of not letting her privileged character be lazy about their moral obligations, which books also don’t always do well.  You get a sense that some of the meta-point here is that the massive social inequality is getting in the way of the D/s the couple would naturally prefer. Mak doesn’t want to be chattel, and Kira doesn’t want to be objectified. 

Kira, the dominant lead, also grapples with both a fair bit of sexism around her role as an Admiral (in this case meaning the commander of a large combo cargo/combat ship with a fair bit of other authority in her society) and in navigating the way other people tend to project their own fantasies onto her, both a a challenge or expecting her to play the admiral with them in her personal life. Mak, our sub, was submissive in the kink sense before he was thrown into slavery bombards her with a fair amount of idealized hero worship, but part of his arc is about rediscovering he can enjoy submission again in a (mostly) consenting context.

All told, this one remains on my top 10 lists, probably even top 3. About the only thing I can really complain about it that we probably aren’t getting a third book in the series, but as this is also clearly a labour of love, I am going to count myself luck with what we got.

Where to Buy

Where to Find the Author

I cannot locate so much as a defunct twitter account, but if anyone has anything better than an Amazon author page I would love to update this.

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

“His Secret Illuminations” by Scarlett Gale [Femdom Book Review]

by

The TL;DR for this one is that a physical difference (big streetsmart warrior woman/small booksmart mage) forms our starting premise for an opposites attract dynamic to blossom in some cozy adventuring fantasy. Why it’s good is entirely in the execution, and its runaway popularity for an indie is a good thing to point to whenever anyone says femdom books are not marketable. It deserves the love it gets, and in further emphasis of its merits, if you extracted any of the overt kink or romance elements it would still stand on its own without them.

Although I actually read His Secret Illuminations several years ago, back when it came out, I am using the purchase of the physical books as my excuse to finally get around to gushing about my enjoyment of them, and of course giving it a re-read.

Our protagonist, Lucien, is a monk, from an isolated monastery from the most hardline version of his sect. That sect has hired Glory of the Snow, a massive, blonde and vaguely Viking coded woman, to retrieve some stolen books. She’s worked with the monastery before on smaller quests, giving the couple time to have a meet cute and establish a bit of mutual interest, but the need for retrieving the Macguffin gives a convenient impetus to throw them together. Glory, for all her fighting prowess, lacks the magic Lucien has that will let him track and correctly identify the missing items. This, in turn, throws him well out of his comfort zone, both having to navigate his extreme sexual repression and figuring out how to function in a world where every choice is no longer made in service to the monastery.

As far as the fetishes being indulged here, Gale does a good job with playing with the fantasy of Lucien’s extreme innocence and naivety well for self indulgence purposes, but without tripping into being tedious or making one unduly concerned about his ability to consent. Importantly, for those of you who may hesitate because of the number of strangers who keep calling you Mommy uninvited, at no point does it ever stray into making him full on hobosexual-helpless. The fantasy here isn’t about him being without life coping skills, rather giving a way to gender bend the princess-in-the-tower trope. And to justify a nearly stratospheric amount of yearning on the male lead’s part. 

Inversely, Glory’s endless well of patience still manages to remain a power fantasy for a dominant reader, because a great deal of emphasis is put on making Glory a complete person and giving Lucien lots of opportunities to show his use to her. She is allowed to be appreciated for what she is good at, and the falling in love part on her side is essentially discovering just how rapidly he gets up to speed and is then able to keep up with her. The premise is opposites attract, yes, but the conclusion is competence likes competence, even if this can take many forms. Likewise how the other characters react to the budding romance also makes it clear that Lucien and Glory are each other’s type, but it’s not making any sort of fundamental judgment that only these two could truly love each other, or their ability to appreciate each other is some sort of virtue.

The overt femdom elements likewise flow very naturally, in so much that there’s an almost mirror scenario going on that the more comfortable Lucien gets with the outside world, the more intensely we get to see him yearn to be mauled and pinned by Glory. Thus, while the couple doesn’t actually bang until the very last chapter, by the second half of the book the spice has started to seriously kick in. Using Lucien here as the perspective character seems to mostly be because the reader is assumed to want to focus most closely on all the horny submissive vulnerability he is giving off.  

As far as the sex scenes, I would describe them as a natural continuation of the overall themes of exuberant self discovery. The whole book is an immersive sensory experience with a lot of emphasis on embracing the whole body, just as much through food, bathing, clothes and physical activity. Inversely, the real conflict of the book is largely internal. Though there’s many smaller adventures along the way, from medical emergencies to heists, Lucien’s main struggle is with religious guilt, and its typical over emphasis on discomfort and deprivation. 

The way Glory is constructed and how we are allowed to get to know her is also extremely refreshing. Fetishization is often synonymous with objectification, and the larger culture we live in struggles with the idea of a dominant woman as an anomaly. All too often fictional female dominants can veer into becoming avatars of inspiration more so than human beings. This can be particularly the case when the domme character’s role is as a guide (or an antagonist). Sometimes you counter balance this by giving her a challenge of her own to surmount, but inversely this can lead to these characters being stuck being incomplete until the sub comes along. Glory is fine. She doesn’t need a partner not as an act of bitter rebukement, and she has enough openess to others Lucien can have a reciprocal relationship, but we absolutely avoid any hint of feeling ashamed, freakish or rejected without reducing her down to some sort of inexplicable force of nature.

I don’t mind stories of overcoming the world’s efforts to make women small, submissive and compliant, but while there is one scene where those pressures are explored as a potential hazard the book otherwise goes out if its way to make sure you know that’s more of a minority opinion among the citizens of the world. Sometimes, as a dominant reader you need a break from being told you are a freak, even a virtuous one, you know?

I also think it’s worth talking about how much this intersects between wish fulfillment and the mundane beliefs of the culture that produced it. As much as you could call this a Romantasy, it’s equally on the spectrum of being a LitRPG. That’s not to say that the characters have explicit game style overlays and talk about their abilities in terms of levelling up, but the strongest influence here on the setting and plot is on the norms we accept from fantasy TTRPGs. That’s a world where we accept that “adventurer” is a job, where people doing that job have specialized roles like Fighter or Wizard. Likewise, the story is told through an alternation of giving the character a challenge to solve as a group and a period to rest and improve their skills and gear. Thus, tonally what you are getting here benefits from giving you the vibes of playing a very interesting roleplaying game without but without any of the mechanical elements of the game intruding on the story it’s trying to tell or requiring any familiarity with the hobby.  


This choice of medium is ideal for the sort of story Gale is trying to tell. Most obviously, the premise depends on the fact that the game systems that influenced it decided to move away from default sexism baked into the mechanics of the game (for example avoiding adding gender based penalties or bonuses). The other reason is one that gets less spoken of. The elements that make a game function overlap so much with how modern kinky people get up to their shenanigans that the latest edition of The Dungeon Master’s Guide opens with instructions on how to conduct a consent negotiation one could practically lift unchanged and use in a much more intimate context. This cross pollination is intentional and direct, a symptom of the observation that the Venn Diagram between nerdy and creative hobbies and the people who do BDSM is essentially a circle.

For His Sacred Illuminations, therefore, not making your characters approach the ethos of sex like a kinky person would be weirder than the fact that they do. So, as a result, everything works.

Lasty though, I will flag that Gale has actually split things into two books. His Sacred Incantations finishes the couple’s overall story, but the ending of the first and second parts is much more a matter of the pragmatics of serialization than any real completed story arc in the first volume. You could argue that you have reached the traditional romance part’s conclusion by the end of book 1, and book 2 is more about drawing you deeper into the world, but I believe book 2 is just important for what it is trying to do, which, having set up the dynamic between the characters we now get to see it in action.

I think that’s particularly important, given that their initial dynamic is built on setting based power imbalances, whereas in book two we get to see the dynamic run on a firmer foundation of mutual reliance. If you are willing to take the risk on it, buy both books in one go.

Where to get your own copy: Author’s website, directly.

Femdom Review “Wooing the Witch Queen” By Stephanie Burgis

by
The cover of "Wooing the Witch Queen" by Stephanie Burgis. It shows a shorter brown haired woman in a blue dress and crown clutching the chin of a taller man with curly brown hair. They are in a library with a raven and a silver mask nearby.

This is PG-13 rated femdom. No, I am not kidding, someone has managed to get a three book deal from a mainstream publisher for a no sex young adult aimed romantasy series about a trio of evil witches and the subs that love them. 

Lest you think I am just inferring from the setting, no, I do mean this is an intentionally kinky book. In the scenes in which the two leads (Saskia, research witch) and Fabian (aka Felix, nobleman in disguise) discuss their feelings, with each other or in their heads it is expressed in terms of his submission. The scenes of fooling around are written entirely as consensual physical domination. But, there’s no sex in page or even a fade to black and the text gives you one stark “fuck” as far as cuss words. This is explicitly appropriate for who this book is aimed for, a person aged 12-18.

The reading level, likewise, took me about three hours (including a break) to zip through it. Tonally, it lands 100% in the current trends for Cozy and Villain-Is-Actually-Hero. This is about youthful wish fulfillment and vicarious ambition, defying your wicked guardians and coming into your own power. Also getting to be goth and spooky while you do it.

And it’s neat, because it both underlines the femdom-hiding-in-plain-sight thing I keep going on about and suggests a market of increasing tolerance. With a small mountain of books (YA or otherwise) where the heroine has to struggle to understand the moody supernatural male and navigate his power they implied threat of that, it’s good that I can go into a Barnes and Noble spot a book where the heroine is maybe a little menacingly clutching the hero’s face with her hand and have it actually deliver. 

Nonetheless, I think it’s worth going into this review to also point out that if there wasn’t a clear flag of potential Femdom on the cover I wouldn’t have bought the book. While it was true I read a lot of this kind of fantasy when I was the primary age this is aimed at (in my day it was Dealing with Dragons, Myth Adventures, etc…), but I am pretty old. My wish fulfillment wants are now those of middle aged marrieds. I don’t want to defy my parents anymore, I have to think about them dying and what it says for my own mortality. I don’t need to realize the power was in me all along, I have to think about how to navigate passing the things I built on and symbolic or literal parenting. Young me would have gobbled “Wooing The Witch Queen” up and added it to her head library. Older me has to go into what is ultimately a positive review with the awareness my biggest criticisms are all aspects of it that are Not Written For Me.

So, before I do my usual grumpy fussing, let’s first talk about the unequivocally good parts. Fabien/Felix, our male lead, gets to be hot and useful. He doesn’t need to be cast as some sort of weirdo that he finds our heroine Saskia fascinating. Indeed I suppose there’s one wish this book did fulfill, it’s living in a world where women can be dominant and not have the entire narrative structure say “WHAT A SHOCKING REVERSAL OF ROLES!!!”. It’s like when you are queer you get very tired of coming out stories, even if that’s part of the larger queer experience. This also isn’t a gender flip story where he has to be more feminine to permit her to dominate, it’s just one where being attracted to villain coded people or wanting someone to kneel for you is equal opportunity.

While I told you there was no on page sex, there is, what I would describe as a very well done emphasis on flirting and starting to initiate as a domme, written with a good balance of situational chemistry and emphasis on consent. A main conflict is that after the leads determine they are into each other, Fabian/Felix still needs to reveal he’s actually in disguise and not the person she assumes him to be. But there’s a lot of on page yearning, pressing up against each other and touching with the offer of domination if the other party wants to lean into that while still leaving them room to back out.

Seriously, this is what I mean when I say that BDSM is often unfairly over sexualized in a way it doesn’t need to be. Nothing lewd happens here, in the entire book. At closest, the word “aroused” is used once, but we get no specifics. It might as well be a synonym for attracted. And, in the inevitable HEA, the characters are cuddled in bed together, but the description is so scrupulously free of even the suggestion they are naked that you might as well assume the male lead was reading some more of his poetry to the heroine. That’s actually kind of refreshing. D/s is permitted to be just what some people want by default.

However, now I do need to put my caveats. The biggest one is an accidental side effect of the fact our hero spends most of his time completely swathed in fabric. When our hero flees to the titular Witch Queen’s domain seeking sanctuary, thanks to a fortuitous choice in cloak he is mistaken for a Dark Wizard and promptly hired to staff. Our heroine, for plot convenient reasons, refuses to look under his hood. Shortly after this introduction, his disguise is added to with a mask the last Dark Wizard left behind. That’s just a vocation in this world, mysterious shrouded magical figure of menace. The problem here is that the text also keeps having everyone reacting to him like he is stunningly hot. Of course when you have a character essentially wearing a niqab for three quarters of the book that doesn’t preclude communicating chemistry in other ways. You could emphasize his posture, the bits that show like his eyes, talk about scent, or pad things with sparkling dialogue. Hell, you could just describe the cape itself as intriguing.

Wooing the Witch Queen doesn’t. It’s the world’s slowest strip tease, from masked to half mask, from cape to a formal suit and bare face. But, even when the characters have a moment of being pressed together, the narrative stays perfectly coy about specifics. It tells you this is a very alluring scenario, but it doesn’t show why. One can do asexual alternatives to stereotypical attraction without completely jettisoning sensory specifics. 

Additionally, there were places where the elements I will call Cozy wore a bit thin. For example, our Witch Queen, Saskia, lives in a castle full of monstrous staff. They are of course, Just Misunderstood by bigoted humans, but in addition to that, they are slavishly dedicated to serving the leads. This is unlike the other two secondary plots: Saskia navigating that her First Minister is her ex girlfriend, and her reluctant friendship with the extremely extra other two Villain Queens she is in alliance with. Both are storylines where the motivations of the characters are more complicated. The Troll housekeeper and major domo, not so much, for all they constantly demand appeasement. While I get that having surrogate parents who are endlessly giving of every domestic comfort is a fair fantasy to have, it would have been nice to let the Trolls or the Goblins have wants and needs more personlike. One more plot about the monsters wanting something more than you to eat their perfectly made scones and to get enough sleep (or maybe making the Trolls/Goblins more morally grey) would have fixed this.  

And yet, for all of that, this book didn’t collapse too far into the problems that many Cozy books do, of destroying their own stakes to save their sweetness. The tension with Mirjana, the First Minister, made sense given that she both led the rebellion that put Saskia on the throne and is doing the actual day to day business of running the country. I also admit I made the mistake of thinking she was actually a sentient magic mirror until she showed up in person (I mean, her name is right there! Also she’s obsessed with Sakia’s public image!), but I found the conflict was a plausible problem and the resolution worked, even if I am sort of sympathizing with Mirjana here more than maybe the narrative wanted me to. I also likewise didn’t find the way the threat of invasion ended too was convenient. Cozy books are going to magically have a reason why you need to take the army on your border (or the villain threatening your goals) seriously, yet also not have a single person die. Without going too far into spoilers, the book did a good technical job of building to a zero bloodshed resolution that didn’t feel like it was just handed to the heroes.

And I think the best endorsement I can give is that I do plan to buy the next book in the series when it comes out. I expect pretty much more of the same, (cozy, but no sex) since Queen Lorelai of the Fairies spent a good part of her dialogue making sure we knew how much she loathed her future love interest and vamping about being a man eater without talking about precisely what she was doing, but I am absolutely here to see how Burgis pulls it off.

Author site in lieu of Amazon link:

Wooing the Witch Queen