The Resurrection of Josephine by Melinda Barron

TITLE: The Resurrection of Josephine
AUTHOR: Melinda Barron
PUBLISHER: Resplendence Publishing
LENGTH: Novella (roughly 19k)
GENRE: Paranormal ménage erotic romance
COST: $3.50

An evil spectral presence at a funeral nearly kills medium Martin Vandreen, but he escapes, determined to find out what it could be. When lovers Rumer and Noah break into his home to enlist his help, he learns the presence is an awful witch who has been finding human hosts for centuries. Now bound to the cemetery, she’s about to be freed, unless Martin, Rumer, and Noah can stop her…

I have the worst luck with ménage erotic romances. I admit I have certain parameters that I try to match up; for instance, I’m not interested in anything involving family members sharing, like a group of brothers with one woman. And all that needing a third to complete them is usually rubbish. So even though I look at them when they come out, I invariably buy very few ménages. Yet, even those few I buy end up being a waste of money.

I liked the premise of this novella. I’d read the author before and I hadn’t been hugely impressed, but I thought, It’s been a year and a half, maybe I just had bad luck the first time. The excerpt seemed like it might be tense and interesting, too. Martin undergoes a very unpleasant experience at the cemetery, and he seemed to have a sense of humor about the whole thing, so I gave it a go. The first chapter is fine enough, even the second chapter. But then Rumer and Noah show up, and everything goes downhill from there. Not in the conflict. I can buy the fact that Rumer finds it necessary to break into Martin’s home and ask for his help getting rid of the witch Josephine. No, the part where I start to lose it is when Rumer and Noah decide to spend the night to supposedly protect Martin from Josephine, and because there’s no guest room, they’ll just sleep in his bed. In their underwear, of course. It’s just ludicrous, and only becomes more so from there.

The next morning, Martin wakes with a hard-on, and two people who want to have sex with him. At that point, the dialogue takes a turn for the worse: "Why don't we all play together," Noah said. "I'm hard, too, and I know my baby's wet. Mutual masturbation might help us forget the horrible way we met last night." I thought there might be a respite when it shifted back to the ghost plot, but after a brief encounter, Martin decides what he needs to feel better is – guess what – sex. It might have been more palatable if the sex scenes worked for me, but these didn’t either. Under no circumstances will I ever find the word “anus” erotic. Especially when it comes so close on the heels of “nether opening.” It just got to be too much, because as soon as that engagement with the scene breaks down, it’s next to impossible to get back, especially when the things that bothered me in it are still prevalent.

Unless you’re a fan of the author, or don’t mind terminology like “nether opening” in your sex scenes, I can’t say that I’d recommend it.

Readability	6/10 – Starts out all right, but the dialogue made me laugh, which only made the overwritten sex scenes even funnier.
Ménage	4/10 – Not hot, and starts out with one of the silliest reasons to put three people naked in a bed together that I’ve read in a while
Characterization	5/10 – Individually, could probably hold their own, but any attempts to make them well-rounded fail as soon as talk turns to sex and emotions
Entertainment value	3/10 – The idea is promising, but I lost any sense of credibility for it as soon it tried to turn amorous
World building	6/10 – Hints of some nice atmosphere, but it gets lost in the erotic elements
TOTAL:	24/50

Sweet Vibrations by Melinda Barron

TITLE: Sweet Vibrations
AUTHOR: Melinda Barron
PUBLISHER: Loose Id
LENGTH: Novel (roughly 45k)
GENRE: Contemporary BDSM erotic romance
COST: $5.99

Financial difficulties give Lucy Travers no choice but to sell the prized motorcycle her uncle left her when he died. When she meets the potential buyer, Lake Ross, however, she’s not prepared for the physical attraction, or for the knowledge that he’s a Dom. A submissive at heart, Lucy has been out of the scene since she got burned on her divorce, but Lake is determined to be her new Master. When he discovers an unknown key under the seat of the bike he bought, however, danger arises in Lucy’s life that threatens both of their happiness.

I read BDSM for a lot of reasons, but for it to really work for me, it requires a balance. Pain with the pleasure. Reward with the punishment. Give with the take. That’s what the D/s relationship does for me. Different authors have different approaches – some of them take it easy and stick with a little bit of mild bondage, while others focus on the control aspect – but in this particular story, there’s a schism. Repeatedly, the characters talk about trust, a crucial aspect to any D/s relationship, but the vast majority of the interactions between them in the BDSM milieu are punishments. Granted, Lucy deserves some of them. I understand, too, Lake’s need to build trust in her. But reading punishment after punishment was tedious by the time I was halfway done. I had to fight to finish the second half of the story, especially when Lucy turned around with the most inane twist of logic and deliberate decision that made me want to pop her head off like a dead dandelion.

My reaction to Lucy is probably a little extreme, but I’d already had a few problems with her prior to the ridiculous and inexplicable reason she had to deliberately lie to Lake 2/3's of the way through the story. The information about her submissive side is blurted out to the reader at the end of chapter two, when Lake tells her that her friend Margaret already told him that she was a sub. It’s the first indication the reader gets that Lake is a Dom, too, and from that point on, Lucy’s personality changed. All of a sudden, she was far more submissive, and the transition felt schizophrenic at best. Her thoughts from that point on are all about how can she trust Lake, and how she wants to submit to him, when there was little to no acknowledgement prior to that point that she even had those tendencies. It became very difficult to invest in any kind of romance then, especially with all the punishment issues I already had.

If the subplot regarding her dead uncle were stronger, maybe I wouldn’t mind so much about the problematic romance. But the early efforts to build the suspense of what the mystery could be are shafted by most of the climactic events being summarized or glossed over in the latter half. The whole thing feels like a very flimsy excuse to have Lucy act out against Lake, and for Lake to give another punishment. Since I was already well done with that aspect of the story, it wasn’t enough for me. By then, I needed something to keep me interested in the story, and the subplot failed to supply it.

Readability	6/10 – Simple enough prose, though uneven pacing and character jumps means it doesn’t engage as it should
Heroine	4/10 – This one suffers from random acts of stupidity that annoyed me to no end.
Hero	6/10 – No amount of posturing elevates a rather flat Dom
Entertainment value	5/10 – Too much repetition of punishment as erotica combined with a heroine I wanted to strangle made the latter half of this tedious to read.
World building	6/10 – When they were at the BDSM club, I believed in their world. Outside of it…not so much.
TOTAL:	27/50