Girl next door Brooke Knight is building a new life for herself in Michigan. There she meets Calvin Jones, successful owner of a coffee shop and a gym, who looks great in a tight t-shirt. When the two sweethearts fall swiftly and madly in love, it seems like everything is coming up roses. But a dark secret from Brooke’s past is coming to tear it all apart.
An essential factor when you choose what romance to read is a) to know your kinks (although be open to discovering new ones) and b) to know the kinks the author writes about. Wynter Adams likes to write about rough and often non-consensual sex happening to people who really rather it wouldn’t. For people who have read Bittersweet and don’t see why it’s non-consensual, I’ve put a spoiler in the endnotes – sometimes being a lawyer is handy.[i]
There is nothing wrong with rape/sexual abuse as a fantasy or as a type of romance novel. Fantasising about this stuff doesn’t mean you want it in real life! Meanwhile, Adams writes in a clean, accessible fashion – it’s hot stuff – and she writes sympathetic characters (essential given what she’s going to do to them).
My problem is that if you wanted, for some unfathomable reason, to build a scale of my kinks, then over here is me, and way, way, way, way, past Andromeda, on beyond many other galaxies, is rough, non-consensual sex. It turns me off faster than Mrs Thatcher’s boobies, and she’s dead. This just isn’t a genre of romance that is ever going to appeal to me.
If you’re into slasher movies and their ilk (I’m not); if like stories of bad things happening to good people; if rough non-consensual sex pushes your buttons in a romance novel (I’m absolutely not judging), then Adams is good at what she does, and I think you’ll very quickly have a library of her books in your Kindle. Worth trying out – you never know what you might like!
[i] *** SPOILER ALERT ***
You can’t have consensual sex in a case of mistaken identity. I mean, it should be pretty-obvious from the scenes in question that Calvin is being abused – even before you find out why and how.
