Breaking Free by Karen Erickson

TITLE: Breaking Free
AUTHOR: Karen Erickson
PUBLISHER: Amber Quill Press (Amber Heat)
LENGTH: Short story (roughly 11k)
GENRE: Contemporary erotic romance
COST: $4.00

With a new membership to the sex club, the Kama Sutra Club, Mallory wants a night of anonymous passion. The manager Blake spots Mallory and decides to make her dreams come true, including her desire to have a threesome for the first time in her life. The night of passion that ensues is more than Mallory ever dreamed…

As I was reading, I had every intention of focusing my review on this story about how short stories shouldn’t be afraid of being erotica if they can’t work a romance angle. I got to the final chapter in it, however, and was completely thrown aback by the gotcha ending the author tacked on. Seriously. So now I’m going to complain about gotchas.

Gotcha endings are great when they work. When is that? When the reader can go back into the text and see all the signs that the author planted along the way to point at the gotcha. Then, a reader gets that feeling of, "Oh, I should have seen that coming." Surprise is a very good thing. If there aren’t any signs, however, a reader is left with a whole feeling of “what the hell is going on here?”. Like Bobby dreaming away an entire season of Dallas. It’s lazy, and it’s annoying, and I don’t know about other readers, but it turns me off a writer faster than almost anything else. Because I feel cheated.

Why does it feel like I was cheated? Because there are internal monologues for both hero and heroine before the last chapter that contradict the end. Or at the very least, feel like they contradict. Maybe if the story had stuck with a single POV, I could have bought into the gotcha. But it didn’t, and I didn’t, and honestly, I doubt I’d trust this author again to buy another of her stories. It’s a shame because if it had stayed simple as a piece of erotica, I would have liked it a lot better. But the entire feeling of, “Oh, I need an HEA! Quick! I better tack one on!”, leaves me cold.

Readability	8/10 – Easy prose that maintains a nice balance of eroticism
Hero	5/10 – When the focus is on the smut, there leaves little room for characterization.
Heroine	4/10 – I know even less about her than I do the hero. At least, until it’s too late.
Entertainment value	2/10 – I wasn’t minding this too much as an erotic story – not a romance – until the gotcha ending pissed me off.
World building	4/10 – This is about the smut. Who has time to create a real world here?
TOTAL:	23/50