Genre: Romance, Drama
Published: 2011
Personal rating: 5/5
Yearly count: 41
Stephan has lived the lifestyle of a Dominant for five years. After several rebellious teenage years, it gave him the stability and control he had been seeking after his parent’s death. As president of a not-for-profit foundation, he knows what his future holds and what he wants out of life. All that changes when a simple lunch with his college friend and Mentor, Darren, leads him to buying a slave.
Thrust into a situation he never thought he’d be in, Stephan can’t walk away. He is compelled to help this girl in the only way he knows how. But Brianna knows only one thing, she is a slave. She has nothing. She is nothing. Can Stephan help Brianna realize that she is much more than just a Slave?
I started this book with equal amounts of anticipation and trepidation. This kind of storyline can make for a really good book, or one riddled with clichés and bad writing. But this book was even better than I had anticipated. I couldn’t put it away and the story pulled me in completely.
What I liked most about this book was how the author never went for the easy solutions. There was no magical cure for Brianna, Stephan made mistakes – some which he realized and some which he didn’t (want to) see. The secondary characters were well rounded, none were completely vilified, something that could have easily happened with Richard’s character. He doesn’t approve of Stephan’s lifestyle, but loves his nephew enough to keep trying, and he does have a valid point about Brianna, even though Stephan refuses to hear it.
What I also really liked in this book was the way the lifestyle was depicted. No hard-core BDSM just for the sake of it, no BDSM fairy tale where everything is always candies and roses and nothing ever goes wrong, but no vilifying it either. But I was most impressed by the fact that the author never drew a line in the sand between submission and voluntary slavery where submission was the ‘right’ choice and slavery the ‘wrong’ choice. Considering this was a book about a girl rescued from forced slavery, such a distinction could have easily been made but never was. In fact, the author showed that neither submission nor slavery is wrong, as long as all parties agree to it.
So, all in all, I was very impressed with this book and I liked it very much. I was very sad to see the end of it. The ending itself is very open ended and after some checking on the author’s blog, it appears that this was the first book in a series about Stephan and Brianna. Now that I can get behind! I highly recommend this book and I look forward to reading the next one in the series.
*This book was an Early Review book provided to me for free. This did not in any way influence the contents of my review*
