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The Raunch Review: Book 25

Spring is in the air, my dear! Or that’s what I hear from all those party people that like to blow on about the state of the clouds and the moisture levels and all that, where has the sun gone etc etc. Why is it so chuffing cold? Well, at bloody cock-fucking last, that’s what I say.  

My Valentine’s date went pretty badly, thanks for asking. I’d prefer not to go into the ins and outs, but I will because I can see that you’re pleading with me. The long and short of it is (and he was pretty short, in that department) that I caught norovirus from this guy’s arse. I was getting down to it and I suddenly felt very sick indeed. As sick as a projectile vomiting dog with a chronic shitting disease. Subsequently, I experienced the full force of my failure to consider the general rules on hygiene and respectability. Needless to say, he got out of there sharpish and left me swanning around in my own effluent.

Anyway, I’ve pressure washed the carpets and incinerated the duvet covers, so I’m good to blow on. Violet’s weekly adult book review is back and it’s a eye ball squeezer of a dystopian Sci Fi banger set in little England. The aim, as always, is to attempt to answer that scalding question: can a good book ever be as greasy as a good fuck?

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Book title: The Gas
Author: Charles Platt
Publisher of this edition: Savoy Books Ltd
Copyright: © Charles Platt 1970
First published: 1970
Cover illustration: Harry Douthwaite

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis:  An accident in a factory releases a gas, which settles over southern England, and makes everyone go sex mad and/or outrageously violent. In essence, it strips humans and animals of all their inhibitions and pent-up urges. The book follows Vincent, who in part is responsible for the release of the gas, as he tries to get back to his wife and kids in order to take them to Scotland (where the gas can’t reach). 

Title: It does what it says on the tin really. Pretty much sums up what we’re dealing with. The gas happens and nothing will ever be the same again in little England, where everyone is so totally repressed. 

Cover image: The cover is extraordinary and screams FUCK ME I’M A SCI FI CLASSIC. A great example of the crass grisly cover art of that period. The illustration is pretty bestial, aggressive and intimidating, which is an accurate reflection of the shit between the covers. Some strange Medusa like person is dribbling over her own tits, nice. Circles, lots of circles, circles are sexy. 

Best sentence/s in the book:

The aura of sex she was radiating was like sitting next to an electric fire. 

The waves of swelling pleasure emanating from his prick seemed to be coming from the car itself. 

Vincent watched helplessly as the policeman started massaging the dog’s penis, first as if to dispel the pain, but then faster. 

She smelled of sweat and old condoms. 

A party of suburban wives had tied their husbands down naked on the floor in a long line, and were playing a sexual variation of musical chairs on them. 

In the corner, a group of schoolboy plane-spotters had grabbed aircraft models from the check-in counters and were experimentally seeing how far the models’ fuselages would penetrate up each other’s anuses. 

His fingers squelched into her fat, slobbery cunt. 

The priest tried to kneel up, slipped, fell on his side and started shitting uncontrollably. 

He was a red and pink and brown pudding on the floor. 

“I’ve come!” he yelled, jism started rushing up past his face in long, sticky streamers, pulled out of Cathy’s cunt by the roaring wind. 

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Overall sexual content: The book is absolutely crammed with sex and violence. It begins very sexily and then quickly degrades into a sex crazed gore fest. There is a very erotic element to the sex at the beginning of the book, which is urgent and desperate, but not yet totally alienating and hate fuelled. Obviously as the book progresses the sex gets more and more extreme, almost to the point where life no longer matters anymore and sex is used simply as a weapon and orgasm as a means to regaining a small degree of rationality. 

It is very interesting that the sexual anarchy that ensues sees men and women at war with each other. Both men and women seize the opportunity to abuse and violate the opposite sex in a way that implies that that is what they have always wanted but never been brave enough to make happen. 

Overall conclusion: 9 out of 10.

Titillation station: The beginning chapters are right up there on the sexy scales. The sex is hot and titillating, despite the fact that once again men are in the driving seat (metaphorically and literally, lots of sex happens a stolen Rolls Royce) and women are given no choice but to suck it up. However, all the erotic charge of the book dries up instantly as the sex becomes more and more taboo and extreme. 

Food for thought: It is an absolute banger of a book. One of my all time favourites. It’s no wonder that when it was released in the UK in 1980 it was seized by the book police. It is unapologetically rough. In more ways than one. Charles probably wrote it in a week – given the amount of spelling mistakes – and the fact that this writer and journalist in his own right, wrote it for money for the magnificent churner outer of erotic and avant-garde literary fiction Ophelia Press. I’m tempted to read his hands-on non-fiction works on electronics just for kicks. 

There is a big section in the book where Cambridge University students begin kidnapping women to carry out appalling supposedly scientific but totally sexual experiments on them. Most of the descriptions are gratuitous and inherently cruel, with most of the women dying as a result. What is implied here and explicitly stated at one point, is that these men have always felt an inner dislike/threat from female sexuality and take the opportunity in a lawless society to enact horrific acts on women in the name of science, as some sort of fucked up form of revenge for something unsaid/unknown.  

I would have given it the top bollocks (10/10) but the end just deflated my arse before I was satisfied. Sadly, with great ideas sometimes there is no way that the end can live up to the promised climax.

P.S. I wasn’t too keen on the incest stuff even though I get that it’s the big taboo. At least the violence was very obviously horrific, whereas the incest was presented in a loving and sexy way, which was a pretty mouldy dick to swallow. 

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The Raunch Review: Book 24

Greetings from the middle of February.  Are you ready for a thriller?

I have been swelling. Like a jaundice Soufflé aux épinards. I looked in the mirror one rusty morning and was pretty bowled over. I had grown at least two feet and still had the remnants of the night before on my face. I had juiced a man’s prostate. He had a lot in the trap, if you catch my drift. I suspect he hadn’t let the pigeons out in a while. They were all breaking their necks to get into the fresh air. It’s nice to feel close to someone sometimes. Like right up in their mechanism. Anyway, Violet’s weekly adult book review has dropped and it’s a hard-boiled bollock of a thriller. The aim, as always, is to attempt to answer that pregnant question: can a good book ever be as brain-dead as a good fuck?

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Book title: In The Cut
Author: Susanna Moore
Publisher of this edition: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Copyright: © Susanna Moore 1995
First published: 1995
Cover image: Emilio Brizzi / Millennium Images, UK

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis:  In The Cut is a gut wrenching thriller, which follows the comings and goings, and inner workings, of an English teacher at New York University who becomes sexually involved with a policeman investigating the brutal murders of a number of women in the area. 

Title: This one has multiple levels of meaning. The murders all involve women being butchered with blades. Our narrator, Frannie, is also studying New York street slang, which unsurprisingly is very derogatory in nature.  Being ‘in the cut’ is used by several characters to mean ‘in the vagina’.  

Cover image: A close-up of a side profile looking backwards. It is a loaded look, make-up laden and sexual, vulnerable and yet defiant. Certainly, women in this book are being hunted and brutalised. They are the target of hatred even though they don’t necessarily realise it yet. 

Best sentence/s in the book:

“My dick’s so sweet, it’ll give you cavities.”

The cunt was fucking everything that walked. 

I, who refused for years to let my husband in Paris realize his life’s ambition of photographing a scorpion in my vagina. 

“You know, all you really need is two tits, a hole and a heartbeat.”

He doesn’t talk about sex the way some men do, wanting to go over it, wanting to hear the woman describe what it was like, how she hadn’t been able to wipe herself for a week. 

“I loved her so much I used to eat her every night.”

She had a meaty, fat pussy. 

He turned me around and bent me over the desk, yanking my skirt around my waist, and pulled aside my underpants and pushed his fingers, fingers, all his fingers inside me. 

“The only way I could tell he’d come was that he’d look at his watch.”

I was suddenly ashamed, ashamed that there would be an odor, or that his cock would have shit on it, and I could not look. 

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Overall sexual content: The book is full of sex. It is a thriller in more ways than one. Raw, stinking and writhing about the page on the knife edge between lust and hate. It is not an erotic book for me – in the sense that the brutality and general malice that accompanies all the sexual scenarios dribbles through and makes the sex repulsive. Sex is made into something dangerous and frightening, something violent and isolating. It is clap cold, like a body on a slab. 

Aside from the undercurrent of violence that permeates this thriller and annihilates the majority of the titillating aspects, the sex is fantastically well drawn. It feels authentic and desperate and real. Who said that erotica has to encourage positive sexual feelings? Maybe it can make us shrivel up and dry.  

Overall conclusion: 10 out of 10!!!!

Titillation station: It is titillating to a very small degree. The sexual passages are detailed and arousing. That is part of its power. Sex has got a lot to do with the power dynamic, whichever way you position it. And the feelings we have about sex are complex and hard to comprehend. 

Food for thought: It is one of the best books ever written, in my puffed up opinion. It captures something important, something that exists and walks around with us. The female characters are also flawed. The narrator suspects that the policeman she is fucking is a bad man, but she keeps having it off with him anyway. It paints female sexual desire on the page in a brash and real way, as present and obvious. Over the top of that is daubed the aggressive and predatory sexual desire of the male characters, who hold powerful positions in society that are supposed to protect us. The policeman’s hat and the policeman’s badge. His hand cuffs and his arrest warrants. Particularly, it illustrates the use of sex as a weapon and the culture amongst men that can dehumanise the object of their desires. Maybe because they have become too responsible for their own lives. 

Nobody can ignore when reading this book – and probably why it was reissued in 2021 – the parallels with the real culture of misogyny in the police force. The devastating atrocities that have happened in recent memory in full view. The way women are described and the way sex is achieved in this book is pumped full of disgust and one-upMANship. 

I won’t ruin the end. Or tell you how it turns out. Except that it is devastating and close to the nerve to acknowledge that a policeman cutting women’s nipples off and eventually using them as chum, and that person being very confident that he will get away with it, is not shocking and it should be. 

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The Raunch Review: Book 19

Violet Malice has been hard at it. Don’t expect her to back down anytime soon. Sometimes the best things are worth waiting for, like when you queue for two hours for the salad buffet at Pizza Hut and it’s all over dressed and limp around the lips. Some educated people have been saying this book review is a bag of severed dicks and that it should be wiped from the internet like dog shit off a bushy moustache. There are other people that say Violet is choosing the wrong books, you know the valueless pulpy sacks of shit that are not worth the paper they are printed on. They say that maybe she should review the great sex classics written by the inventors of titillation like Henry Miller and all the other bloated big-dicked misogynists that have their heads so far up their own arses that they can’t piss straight. Violet thinks all those people can go fuck themselves. Write your own blog you lazy twats. She’s fine with no one reading any of this – you know what, it’s probably best. So here we go, Violet’s weekly adult book review dives into the 70s this week in an attempt to answer that unadulterated question: can a good book ever be as dishonest as a good fuck?

Book title: Confessions of a Housewife!?*!
Author: Jonathan May
Publisher of this edition: Sphere Books
Copyright: © Jonathan May 1976
First published: 1976
Cover photo: Doesn’t say

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis:  Jonny meets an older woman in a taxi and ends up going home with her. When the horny widow wins a six-week holiday on a spot the ball competition, Jonny finds himself standing in as the ‘housewife’ for her three children. Needless to say, chaos ensues. 

Title: One of the infamous confessions’ books from the 70s, the titles of which all begin the same and focus on the sordid confessions of certain archetypes. This book is particularly playful in that it places the hapless male in the thankless and hopefully totally redundant role of the housewife. 

Cover image: The rogue male is wearing just an apron and drying the dishes, how terrifying. Some hot blonde has got her bare arse all over the surfaces, which obviously turns all our stomachs. Hygiene is a keystone to keeping house. He looks pretty pleased with himself. Like housework is well easy and fun, which is obviously not fucking true. He’s not taking this seriously I suspect, which makes me angry.  

Best sentence/s in the book:

I help the lovely lady on with her flimsy tight black lacy knickers, pulling them carefully up over her long firm thighs, and pressing them into her pussy pelmet so that they nestle snugly in place. 

For a moment I think of that awful bit in Jaws, when the naked bird who’s just had it away, finally has it off by the shark. 

My veal vibrator is rocking and rolling like Chuck Berry with the wind behind him. 

The lady gets her morning tit-bit, and I slide down and give a demonstration of what a cunning linguist I am. 

The first time wasn’t easy, with her lying there like a dead polar bear, and me working away like a docker on overtime. 

The velvet vacuum cleaner is going full force.

By reaching all the way round her, my nimble right hand can manage a bit of extra massage on her booster button. 

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Overall sexual content: Well, well, well. I’m going to shock you now and say that the sex bits are pretty good. Light-hearted, funny and yes, actually, pretty thrilling. The Jonny character is an arrogant cad, but the careful nuance of the writing also makes him a bit of a loser, so it actually works really well. So rather than being a big turn-off, which is what I expected from a sleazy male focused dirty book from the 70s, it was actually a blast. 

Although there are countless motions towards aggressive female desire, the humour and ridicule of the main character make any such comments harmless and part of the overall power struggle inherent to all sexual dynamics. There is great humour in the lies we tell ourselves and the positions we put ourselves in when the curtains are drawn. 

Overall conclusion: 5 out of 10.

Titillation station: A riot really. A great quickie with some laugh out loud moments and no room for any deep thinking. Sometimes that’s exactly what the doctor orders. A momentary escape from reality. 

Food for thought: A prolific and respected sci-fi writer in his own right, Laurence James moonlighted as Jonathan May to write a large helping of this sleaze series. It’s hard to know exactly who they were intended for – my guess is probably men because of the humour and the male focused kink (our Jonny wants to and eventually does have sex with the 17-year-old daughter), but I could be wrong. It seems that pseudonyms helped to save the ‘straight’ writer from any bad shit that might come of writing naughty things. 

Our narrator Jonny calls his prick Edgar, which is actually very funny. It helps to give his cock a life of its own.  There’s no dark undertone to this, but this personification of the genitals does give our protagonist the ability to distance himself from his dick’s behaviour, which is not progress. That way leads to the horror of not being accountable for our actions. Letting ourselves off the meat hook for the good, the bad and the ugly. 

The book is a right laugh, and I really was pleasantly surprised. When I picked the book up, I took a deep breath and steeled myself against what I suspected would be a hornet’s nest of offensive tripe. But I was wrong. These books are a bit of fun. Not to be taken seriously. I mean – of course – they are not the best thing every written, but equally they are far from the worst. It’s actually very hard to write funny. I would gladly have a burrow in the rest of the series when I fancy getting the old laughing tackle out for some gagging. 

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The Raunch Review: Book 17

Violet Malice had this long hot bath on Tuesday that nearly melted the flesh off her bones. She had to stand up for a while to counter the light-headedness that jumped in with her. The mirror looked like a big red lobster with gangly claws all steamed up in some sort of middle-class person’s bathroom. Apparently, or so the internet claims, the scream that you hear when a lobster overheats is the expanding air rushing out of small holes in its shell, which sounds like a whistle being blown. They are not actually that bothered. If you know anything at all about lobsters, then you’ll know exactly what they get up to in the sack. The ladies like to piss in the face of the male over a few days because the urine of the female lobster has a chemical in it that disarms him and transforms the male, as if by magic, from an aggressive Hulk like meathead into a gentle lover. The Urban Dictionary defines ‘the gentleman lover’ as a man who ‘gets his pussy’ by acting as though he truly cares about the girl in order to make her want to sleep with him. What a complicated state of affairs. Now let’s get back to business. Wipe that lobster fucking stuff from your mind. As always, Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that piece of shit question: can a good book ever be as reasonably unpleasant as a good fuck?

Book title: The Fata Morgana Books
Author: Jonathan Littell
Translator: Charlotte Mandell
Publisher of this edition: Two Lines Press
Copyright: © Jonathan Littell 2007, 2009, 2010, 2012
Translation copyright: © Charlotte Mandell 2013
First published: Each of the four short stories published separately as above: 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2012
Cover photo: Matt Henry

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: A collection of four short stories from Jonathan Littell (one of my favourite writers who wrote the beautifully shocking novel The Kindly Ones), which capture unformed obsessions. The stories are vague and haunting, sexy and explicit. They avoid definition and certainty, the only solid foundations being, sensual feelings amongst a mass of contradictions and unexplained dream-like activities. 

Title: The overarching title of the book attempts to unite the disconcerting dizziness that seems to dominate all the stories. The Italian term Fata Morgana means a complex mirage visible above the horizon. The term can be traced back to the name of an Arthurian sorceress Morgan le Fay, who was believed to have conjured up castles or large tracts of land to lure sexy sailors in uniform to their death. Such mirages distort the objects on which they are based, which can include almost any kind of distant objects like massive oil tankers jammed between the sea and the sky, so that the object itself appears to be something else entirely. Now I’m no meteorologist, but if I had to guess I’d say that that sort of weird looking shit faraway is probably caused by the weather or hallucinogenics. And it turns out that this particular type of mirage is indeed caused by a thermal inversion and an atmospheric duct, which occur due to rays of light bending when they pass through layers of air that are all at different temperatures. So, there you bloody go, now you know. 

Cover image: A nice hand. Hands are pretty damn erotic. I’d say more erotic than lots of the other bits of the body. Dressed nails. Red nails = sex. White sheets. If I had to analyse the hand gesture, I would say that this person is probably having it off as the palm is pushing into the mattress possibly through mild elation rather than distress (as distress would be denoted by a balling of the fist). And the sheets, let’s not forget the sheets, they look pretty silky (expensive) and are getting a little trounced by all that writhing around like whipped egg whites when a fork is inserted. 

Best sentence/s in the book:

I came too, in long whitish streams on her golden skin, then I lay down next to her, gathered her in my arms, slept a little; when I woke up, everything began again, without end, without conclusion, without appeasement. 

I was sweating, there was shit everywhere. 

Aside from the dress, she wore nothing but a pair of tiny, salmon-colored panties made of an almost transparent tulle.

When my hand tried to slip into her pants, though, she seized my wrist, with a firm and calm gesture; I kept insisting, between kisses I slipped my fingers here and there, then slowly returned to the elastic; once again, she put up a gentle but unshakable resistance. 

In the end, I found myself lying on my belly, with the older doctor, who had pulled on latex gloves, delicately parting the cleft of my buttocks, and the two women stood leaning over my anus as if over a well, calmly discoursing on what they saw there. 

I also liked to go out in the street like that, with this lace underwear beneath my clothes: it produced a strange sensation in me – light and floating, as if both sexes at once were strolling in my body through the city. 

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Overall sexual content: The sex bits are top drawer. The content of most of the stories is very soupy, so when the sex comes into sharp focus it is very very erotic. Littell seems to be trying to capture the undulation of life and then the contrasting shock of those moments that shiver our timbers and hack through the crapping mundaneness of everyday life. 

In one of the four stories, Story About Nothing, a man who experiences transgenderism is given a porn video by a stranger. His detailed description of seeming to embody both genders and the three-some that takes place on screen is exquisitely written as well as titillating. He watches the tape with an objectivity that is incredibly sexy, eventually discussing his role as the fifth and most important participant in the porno (after the three bodies on screen and let’s not forget the faceless camera operator). 

Overall conclusion: 7 out of 10.

Titillation station: Big bang for your bucks. I was well deep even before I got under the covers. Although I’m biased (the momentousness of The Kindly Ones, which includes an SS officer having graphic sex with a tree branch, means that I was bound to like anything Littell turns his hand to), I can genuinely say that this is a great book. I certainly distracted myself for a couple of hours. Spit poured out of my trumpet if you know what I mean. The horn. It gives you the horn.  

Food for thought: This book is well dirty. The pages smell like sweaty bodies and the text runs off each sheet. I’d really like to bump into Jonathan in the home fragrances aisle of John Lewis. I’d like to think I’d be brave enough to touch his shopping. Maybe I’d tell him about my favourite sentence that he’s written, but then that’s hardly fair on his translator.

The first book Littell published – a wedge of cyberpunk called Bad Voltage – and which Littell calls “a very bad science-fiction novel” – sounds like it needs devouring too, with sausages and gravy. 

I particularly like the bit in one of the short stories – you will have to read them all to find out which one – where the narrator says basically that he has found the woman that he adores most in the world, out of all the women that exist. And then in the very next sentence he says except for this other woman who is just fucking incredibly edible. (I’m just paraphrasing he obviously said it way more poetically than my attempt at writing, which is the equivalent of having some sort of unexpected enema at a BBQ.)

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The Raunch Review: Book 16

Violet Malice has been preoccupied with painted ladies and crotch flies this week. Wondering why buttons are sometimes used instead of zips. Is it a class thing? Does the skin get between the teeth? So, you’re down there, wahey, and you suddenly feel some really hard buttons when you weren’t expecting them to be there, and you’ve got to style it out. It’s hard to undo buttons with your teeth, right? Violet has been out of touch recently. Squirreled away in the South looking like Mona Lisa during a hurried 69. She has been wide awake staring at her mons veneris and trying to complete it. This week’s pulp paperback is a pocket rocket of a read. All skirt and no knickers. A book with a mission to make us all a little bit more dilated. Violet’s weekly adult book review – without frills – attempts to answer that disarming question: can a good book ever be as mouthy and uneducated as a good fuck?

Book title: Orality ’70
Author: Richard E. Geis
Publisher of this edition: Barclay House
Copyright: © Barclay House 1969
First published: 1969

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: The book is made up of a series of interviews with supposedly real people about their sex lives and experiences, with a particular focus on oral sex: the mouth. The book is described on the cover as a psycho-sex study and is very reminiscent of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues in its honesty, however there is one big difference in that the author does enter (literally) some of the stories. It is because of this and the author’s notoriety as a cult writer that I suspect that this is a work of fiction posing as non-fiction. I Googled it and nothing on the book is out there, not even a spunky review or synopsis. All I know for sure is that this book is a follow-up to Geis’ other book Orality ’69, written the year prior, and which also presents supposed first-hand experiences of sex. I have not been able to get hold of a second- or even third-hand copy of Orality ’69, so we will have to make do with the sequel on its own (ideally, I would have reviewed both books together, like the overbearing CEfuckingO that I am). 

Title: Does what it says on the tin. The book came out in 1970 and was a follow-up to Orality ’69 so I presume ’70 refers to the year. Orality is a good word for the job, as it means both the act of verbally communicating (so the interview style of content) and the act of focusing one’s sexual energy on the mouth. So, open wide and swallow it. 

Cover image: N/A. Obviously, scientific books need to look serious. It goes without saying that you can’t whack a big cock on the front of some journal about the metabolic system, it’s just not on. The warning: ADULTS ONLY, is a nice touch. Makes me want to read it. Like when I’m tempted to drink apricot shampoo because it says not for human consumption. Puts the idea straight into my silly little head. 

Best sentence/s in the book:

My wife is a cocksucker!

Her boss commented, “She’s built like the old brick shithouse.” 

I could see the wet pink peanut that was her clitoris between folds of parted flesh. 

Donny and Sammy blew dried peas at her cunt with plastic straws. 

He fumbled her blouse open, got her bra off and “went sort of ape”.

While she licked Sammy’s prick clean of her husband’s shit, Donny stuck a finger in her ass, pulled it out and made her lick that clean, too. 

“With ass it’s mostly tight right at the opening, that’s where you get the feeling from, except if the girl has a load of shit – if she has to take a crap when you plug in – then you get an extra feeling.”

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Overall sexual content: An incredible book. It’s a riot of heady but poignant sex like those trashy magazines that suck you in with outrageous headlines. The mix of people featured is spot on: the boss and his secretary who is also his sex slave; the alcoholic nympho who has never had an orgasm (which feels like it should be an oxymoron to me); the guy who got half his cock shot off and as such has rerouted his pleasure so successfully that he is an undisputed Olympian of eating pussy; a lesbian couple who are obsessed with 69; a senior hetero couple who manage to overcome their sheepishness and go down on each other for the first time after decades of marriage; and the woman hater who is exploding with bile and projected guilt. 

The personal accounts – which could be true – are really touching as well as incredibly erotic. They cover current sexual preferences as well as the person’s sexual history. Any sort of psychoanalysis feels like a bit of a stretch – especially as in a few instances the author ends up being sucked off by the person he is interviewing, which makes a mockery of any sort of authority. But still, I think there is value in trying to understand where inhibitions or preferences might come from, and through sharing personal experiences understand our shared humanity and that we are not alone in our desires.  

Geis is pushing for a more liberal and tolerant society. He is sex positive and calls out the laws in the United States at that time, the government bodies and the church groups that stood in the way of sexual self-expression and freedom. He tells people to think about it. To decide for themselves whether the people presented in this book should be punished (legally and therefore not for pleasure) for their behaviour. 

Overall conclusion: 7 out of 10.

Titillation station: Hot as a chip pan fire in Tenerife. Shortness of breath. Fireworks with loud bangs. Animated before quickly becoming irrational. This is a keeper. To be placed in an accessible position on the under the bed bookshelf right next to the trunk of sex toys. 

Food for thought: Everyone always thinks it’s about sticking it in. Penetration this, penetration that, but in truth it’s not about that stuff at all. Sexy sex and intimacy and pleasure are so much more than nuts and bolts.  It is refreshing to read a good book arguing the corner for something different. For something exposing, gloriously open, and generous. To be the giver of pleasure and to receive pleasure from giving is a beautiful thing. 

I particularly like the bit where the married couple in their 50s decide one evening out-of-the-blue (pun intended) to have oral sex for the first time. He says to her: “I’m going to eat you tonight,” and she replies delightfully “It’s about time.” The detailed description of them giving each other head is exquisite, especially when he locates her clit and gets turned on by her thrashing about in the pillows. She then returns the favour and manages to stop herself from vomiting all over his stomach. Now that’s true love, surely.  

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Violet Malice

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