Bend Over by Brina Brady

Title: Bend Over
Author: Brina Brady
Genre: Contemporary / BDSM
Length: Novel (211 pages)
Publisher: October 31st 2014 by Brina Brady
Heat Level: Explicit
Heart Rating: ♥1 Heart
Blurb: Can Julien tame bad boy Shane?

Runaway 18-year-old Shane O’Rourke is living under the Huntington Beach Pier. He carries many secrets from his past. Shane wasn’t allowed to explore his sexuality when he lived home with his father, The Reverend. His submissive nature and desires had to remain fantasies.

Shane meets a dark stranger on the beach. Julien Callier is a Dom from Martinique and is sixteen years older than Shane. Bad boy Shane wants to win the heart of Julien Callier and become his sub. But does he really understand what Julien expects from his boy?

Julien’s heart goes out to this gorgeous boy and he takes him under his wing, grooming him to be his sub. Julien is determined to let Shane experience the good life, even financing his education, but he’s challenged at every turn by Shane’s rebellious nature.

When Shane’s defiant behavior threatens to come between them for good, Julien has to act fast to teach Shane the meaning of real submission.

Can Julien tame the bad boy? Can Shane give up his old ways of stealing, lying, and using drugs? The playroom is open.

ISBN: B00P2XO5YM

Product Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P2XO5YM

Reviewer: Thommie

Review: This review might contain spoilers, but they are necessary to make my points come through.

Unfortunately I did not like this story, thus I will simply go directly into enumerating what went wrong with this for me.

Shane, MC; Son of a Reverend working for a drug dealer whom he actually loves as a friend for being always there by his side, listening to his troubles, smoking weed together, and using him as a mule…

The fact that he expects to be acknowledged, picked up, helped and God knows what else from a complete stranger made me dislike him with a passion. But when in the next paragraph, he seems to be a naïve and sheltered young man with complete lack of sexual experience with men I was baffled. There is no way around it.

This character’s personality seems to be all over the place, not settling one way or another. He is a virgin in “gay sex” yet he wants to submit to a strong, big, black man. I didn’t know what to feel after one point beside complete lack of interest and strongest belief of a totally non-plausible character profile.

Onward; I really disliked from the start how everything the “stranger” aka Julien, MC #2 did or didn’t got compared with Gus, and while at the beginning, I had the impression Gus. The comparison got so frequent and annoying that I reached a point where I was screaming “If I read “the stranger reminded him of Gus” one more time I’ll delete this damn book from my drive” and while it made sense later on, it still was too much to handle. Repeating something over and over again does not make it appealing.

Further, down my review I will mention the infamous line of this book “he was not allowed to be gay.” It was yet another thing that got repeated so much it caused frustration. As for Julien himself, I found a very cliché type. Rich black guy, leather daddy having a thing for twink longhaired blond…

The plot in general got me a headache from the start. If I thought, the MC’s profile was unrealistic and all over the place, it went double with the backstory.

Revision time: the stranger picked him up and asked him “Do you want to come with me boy” at which point Shane replied “yes” and the stranger picked up both their c#%$ and started stroking. A few minutes later the stranger shot in Shane’s face… which ignited his orgasm making him come at said stranger’s suit jacket…

Now, either this stranger has some seriously supernatural jumping sperm, or someone forgot the setting of this scene. Or… ah, I don’t know, it simply didn’t make sense to me. Likewise, many more things were out-of-place and continued to cause my incredulity, and all this during the first few chapters.

Moving on things like: “he wasn’t allowed to be gay by the Reverend,” yet his hair was long like a girls continued with the ambiguity. Wouldn’t the Reverend had Shane cut his hair in the first place? Shane is supposed to be brilliant (hence the need to continue through his education) yet in his brilliant mode the kid becomes a drinker, drug addict, smoker, and a mule for a drug dealer whom he loves like a father yet has had some sexual related thing with as well. Not to mention the rundown with a complete stranger.
Ah, the frustration!

There are so many, so many details that just drag this entire read down, making it unbearable to read through, tiresome to the point you want to skip 70% of the book. The need for a polishing up and cutting down the pages/details is needed like water to fish for this title to be worth the time, let alone the money.

And there is the whole white skin-black skin fetish. If one can call it a fetish, I don’t know what the PC terms are in this case. What I know is I’ve felt the thing myself. It’s quite a thrill seeing the contrast between two people’s skin in this scale. Somehow it makes you go all yin/yang, black &white, opposite attract, meant to freak be etc. The brain goes under strange chemical reactions when you see your white skin right next to a black one. Honestly, there is a huge psychological thrill going on the background of an interracial relationship.

Here however you don’t get to feel all that. Without wanting to be rude, the way it was portrayed it made me feel somewhat sick, because it was related strongly with the idea “big black guy going to punish slim innocent white boy with his big black c@#$.” It might have worked in a porn-like scenario in an erotic short story or even novelette, but when you see the big picture here and the amount of things going for these characters and their profiles… Whoa! And I mean Whoa! It is too much!

Anyway, I can go on and on about how much work this book needs. I’m repeating myself yet I can’t stress enough how much cutting is needed here. As it is I didn’t like the book, didn’t like the setting, didn’t like the characters, didn’t like the plot, didn’t like the fact that secondary characters took so much space, didn’t like the continuous sexual innuendos from females who by the way were NOT attracted to boys, it was rather obnoxious.

I also didn’t like the inner-thoughts. Keep them hidden and show them to us through actions of the characters. Too many dialogues over everything and nothing. An over the top attempt into trying to be mysterious and enticing with hints at key players and secrets of the past that ended up burdening the story, making the lines flow slower and slower with every passing page.

I could go on… but I’ll stop here and wish this book withdrawn, re-envisioned, edited and re-edited, but mostly cut in half (at least) and out in shelves again.

You will notice how I don’t mention anything about the sexual scenes and anything related to how they were written. It will suffice to say that everything related on that department did not in fact appeal. I’m known to like titles BDSM related, and anything to do with corporal punishment, explicit sexual torture, and/or forced seduction.

This book, while it falls under some of these sub-genres, is badly written in my opinion. so much so, that the writer needs serious research on this area, the lifestyle in general, and the way certain events create patterns into someone’s life and psych. Being half assed and trawling through these genres without proper research or experience makes the book fall flat. I’m pretty sure too many kinksters and people who live in D/s relationships would feel offended by the manner their erotic lifestyle is depicted here.

Shorty’s Review: ♥♥ 1.5Heart

Shane used to work for Gus, a drug dealer, before he decided to leave. But not before stealing some drugs and a motorcycle. The Reverend, who is Shane’s father, is a bigoted jerk and one nasty piece of work who were constantly telling him he’d go to hell for his wrongdoings and for being gay. I found this book confusing at times, because the author would jump from one thing to the next without an explanation.

The bathroom scene between Shane and the stranger seemed highly unbelievable in the fact that no one is going to let someone they don’t even know their name tell them what to do in a sexual situation. Especially when the so-called stranger completely ignores Shane and gives snide comments when Shane tries to talk to them. While asleep on the beach, he is attacked and beaten by thugs for no reason in my opinion. There is a lot of talking about sex in this story and Julien is into BDSM.

The sex scenes in this book seem more like forced or coerced sex than anything consensual. Unfortunately, when I read a book that starts off confusing or jumps from topic to topic with no warning then I lose interest immediately and usually have to force myself to finish it if it’s a review book. This book has some violent scenes in it in my opinion. I normally wouldn’t have chosen this author’s book to review, as I’ve never read her books before. After this one I probably won’t read another one, but was asked for a second opinion on it. This story just didn’t appeal to me at all, nor could I finish it.

* I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review through http://mmgoodbookreviews.wordpress.com *