The title sounds like a euphemism for the clitoris and probably is. 'Harper Bliss' is not the author's real name which begs the question why choose such a lousy pen name? I've read a couple of other books of this nature, but none by this author, and I never will again after this one. The problem appears to be that with this genre, once you've read one, you've read them all. They really are that much like clones. I was sadly disappointed in how uninventive, unimaginative, narrow-minded, and unsubtle the story was. Maybe this is all the readers of this sort of a story need, but if that's true, it's a depressing bellwether for literature or at least for this genre of it.
The novel is set in Australia, a fact I frequently forgot because there's nothing really Australian about it apart from quirks of language here and there. I donlt know if the author is Australian, but she lives with her female partner in Belgium.
The story is about this divorcée, Micky, who is a mother of two, and who has been single for a year and finds she's attracted to women now. Obviously it's one of those raunchy, titillating, so-called romance stories which I normally avoid, but I thought one set in Australia and maybe by an Australian writer might be different. It ought certainly to be a change from endless cookie-cutter American-based novels thought I, but in the end, it wasn't! You can take the romance out of the country, but you can't take the dumb-assery out of the romance.
I've read a couple of other stories like this one: where every frigging character in the novel is lesbian. It's like there are no straight people out there at all, and not even any gay guys for that matter, or anything anywhere else on the spectrum. That's just abusive, and it's as unrealistic as a straight story that has no LGBTQIA characters, or a story featuring white main characters that harbors no PoCs to speak of. It kicks you out of suspension of disbelief - often.
Bad as that is, it's not even the worst thing about this story. The novel is written like this main character is an innocent, naïve, virginal ingénue, but she's in her forties, has a college education, two kids, and she's been best friends with this lesbian woman for two decades. How can she be so ignorant of lesbian life after that? It makes no sense. How come she's never had any sort of dalliance with this friend? It's unrealistic.
And while I'm at it(!): how has this woman been making a living for the last year? It's never discussed, but since this job she takes at a coffee shop is such a challenge, she's obviously living on her husband's hand-outs and she appears completely guiltless about that. She states that she's never worked a day in her whole life, but at a different point she mentions a job she had in college related to a degree she earned, but never used. Why is that? She's clearly sponged off her husband this whole time, and now she continues to do so even after they're divorced? Has she no self-respect? No drive? Nothing motivating her at all? Why would anyone care about someone so dull and bland?
At this point I had no respect for her at all. It makes her look like this dumb-ass gold-digger, which is not a good look for your main character. Yes, raising kids is a serious and full time job, but her kids are older teenagers who are no longer hanging on her apron strings. Does she had no urge for self-improvement? For stretching herself? How does she remotely imagine that she's going to be interesting to a potential partner?
But of course she doesn't have to worry about that because this story isn't about relationships or personality. It's about sex, pure and simple, and a goddess named Robin falls into her lap and is passionately attracted to her, without her making any effort whatsoever. This happens all the time of course.
Robin is a woman Micky's never seen before, despite both she and this woman frequenting this same coffee shop for some time. And her BFF Amber has no interest in this woman or in anything else other than pushing Micky into full-time lesbianism! That's her sole purpose in this 'friendship'! Naturally Robin treats Micky like dirt, and so is the one she has her affair with. Yawn.
The other woman is younger and obviously sexually active. It sounds like authorial wish-fulfillment to me, but the problem is that neither one of these two women has any questions for the other about sexual history before they leap into bed on the first date. That's how clueless this story is! Chlamydia is the most frequently-reported infectious disease in Australia with close to 100,000 men and women diagnosed yearly. Gonorrhea, hepatitis, and even syphilis are hardly rare, yet never once do either of these women concern themselves even momentarily with the fact that a sexually active and clearly promiscuous Robin could conceivably have something to pass on to Micky that isn't sexual experience?
I don't get how people can write this stuff. The author is a lesbian herself, so I have to wonder if she doesn't take any pride in who she is and in others who share her persuasions? Doesn't she want to present lesbianism in an realistic, interesting, and positive light?
I guess a sex romp is a sex romp regardless of what sexual affiliations it dallies with, but to me, the sad thing is that it's supposed to be titillating, yet it's really quite boring and it's so predictable. On the other hand, there's nothing else in Micky's life at all, so maybe that's understandable. Her children are supposedly important to her, but they barely figure in her life, and they seem not to have been raised very well, which is disturbing given that she was a full-time mom!
The athletic younger partner, Robin, is an American because god forbid you should try to sell a novel in the US and it not feature any Americans. How dare you! That's not the problem with Robin though. Robin is a white Aryan Amazon, yet she's supposed to be the diversity officer for the corporation for which she works, bringing the white savior mentality to encouraging diversity in countries where the modal skin tone is seriously darker than her own.
That felt so hypocritical to me. No, there's no reason, ideally, why a diversity officer couldn't be white. It would be racist to suggest otherwise, but in such a white story could we not have this partner be a woman of color for goodness sakes? Or make her some other sort of officer than diversity? Or is that taboo in Blissworld: that white Micky should be attracted to a darker-hued woman?
The only interesting things in this story had nothing to do with the story, but with language as used or not used in English speaking countries. As I mentioned earlier, at one point I'd forgotten I was reading a novel set in Australia because I read so many set in the US unfortunately! It's a lot harder than you'd think to find non-US novels in the US because we're so fucking provincial and insular here. Plus there's very little in this particular novel to really anchor it in Australia, which was disappointing to me. Anyway, one of the characters said "crikey" which is common in Australia and also said in Britain, but not really in the US. I became confused for a second until I remembered that this was not a US novel! LOL! That's how bad things are!
I also became curious about where 'crikey' came from, and apparently it's a euphemism employed in place of exclaiming 'Christ!" I came across 'sod' too, which is used in Britain as a dismissive mild insult, like "you silly sod!" It's apparently an abbreviation for 'sodomite', which I did not know. It's weird that such a pejorative term is used as a mild admonishment in Britain where the word 'bugger' is used similarly, as in, "you silly bugger!" It's almost an endearment. Weird, but true!
But I digress! The sex scenes! They were embarrassing. Can you believe that Micky was pulsing? Her "pussy lips pulsed wildly." Really? She was "reduced to one giant pulsing mess of extreme need." Seriously? I guess that's to be expected since her skin was "throbbing," but now I'm confused. Was she throbbing and pulsing at the same time? Did they alternate? Did one succeed the other?! Every ordinary thing in this encounter is presented as something wicked and sinful, and naughty and kinky, and over the top. But. It's. Just. Sex! And this book is obsessed with lesbian activity to the exclusion of all else: including reality. Neither Micky nor her friend Amber ever considered that her orientation might be bi or pan or any of the other options. No! It's lesbian all the way or nothing! I guess she just pulses that way. Or throbs.
During this same encounter, after her panties are pulled down I read, "As if by instinct, and as though this was all she'd ever done in life, Micky's knees fell wide..." What? Her husband never went down on her? I call bullshit on that. This is when you know an author is poor at their profession because she has such lesbian tunnel vision that she's ignoring the twenty years of physical intimacy between Micky and her husband - it's like Micky never had sex before and that's just dumb writing. Never once does Micky inadvertently make any sort of a comparison between making it with a her husband and making it with Robin, either. It's unrealistic. Either that or Micky is the dumbest cluck in the henhouse, and someone who has absolutely zero introspection.
It's all euphemism - very nearly. Micky could "smell her intimate aroma on Robin's lips" and so on. There's nothing new here; just tired, repetitive, retreaded, rehashed, cheap, fluffy talk that's been written to death already. That was the real problem here. The novel is shallow, boring, unoriginal, and been done to a crisp many times before. That's why I condemn it.
