elfs | [Book Review] Fur For All, by Christine Warren

I picked up Fur For All hoping for a good "furry" smut novel, but it qualifies as "interspecies sex" only in the same way Superman slash qualifies: our werejaguar hero, Rafe, stays in human form for almost the entire book; there is one short scene where he transforms just long enough to intimidate the heroine. His werewolf friends never transform at all; we see them entirely in human form. The love scenes, while hot, always begin with Rafe battering past Tess's weakly-voiced objections because "she doesn't really mean it." Not nice, although by pretty much the second scene they'd agreed on a protocol by which "no" didn't really mean "no"; she'd have to kick him in the balls or something if she really wasn't in the mood. (As one of her friends puts it, "You've been boinking him seven and three quarters of the past eight days.")

But the sex is hot, in a better-than-Harlequin-Blaze way. The plot is silly. The characters are some dense flavor of cardboard, not quite flat but hardly fully developed. Still, I ended up liking Tess, if not the way "destiny" drove her along.

But if you're looking for great girl-on-jaguar sex, it isn't in here. It's an erotic romance novel, its aim is for some mainstream acceptance, and it's not going to do anything that might threaten that.

As an aside, I tried reading the published excerpt from the BDSM SFnal book, Gates of Hell, from the same publisher. I couldn't even finish it. It's a set piece with contrivances that are deader than a Star Trek novel with Shatner's name on it. Why do all BDSM SF novels start with the assumption that not only does mind control work perfectly but that doing so has made society less, not more, interesting?