The Guardian by Mary Calmes

[lightreads]

The Guardian by Mary Calmes

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Abandoned at 60%. I am far too exhausted to work up the outrage this book deserves, so let's do this the quick and clean way.

Blah blah blah gay romance where the ad executive saves a giant dog from a fight, except the giant dog is actually a hot dude from a fantasy dimension.

Item the first: The first time they hook up, hot dude from fantasy land is startled to discover, mid sex act, that the protagonist is willing. This apparently never having happened to him before.

Item the second: Shortly thereafter, the protagonist meets up with the group of women who were hot fantasy dude's previous sexual partners (for financial remuneration). And these ladies elucidate that, indeed, hot fantasy dude is sexually brutal and violent, that it was rape at least some of the time, and that one of them frequently believed that he would kill her during sex.

. . .

You know how I often say that I don't care what a book's kinks are as long as the author knows it? Like, go ahead and have a watersports kink, whatever, it's not my thing but I won't stop you. But for the love of God, own it. Don't pretend it was an accident. 'Oops, my word processor slipped!' 'I just wrote a story about a dude sexing up someone who is drugged unconscious, but it's not rape and how dare you say I would write a story about rape, because I'm the author and I know the unconscious dude secretly wanted it, so there!'

There is very little more secondhand embarrassing than watching someone shame themselves over the kink they are writing stories about, often within the stories themselves.

So yeah, you know how I often say that?

Well, this book is the counter argument. This book explicitly makes sure we know hot fantasy dude is a violent rapist because that makes him sexier to the protagonist, and that is supposed to make him sexier to the reader. There's nothing coy about this, no inference games. Calmes thought being a violent rapist -- being an uncontrollable brutal animal, nearly a direct quote -- makes this guy hotter, and she owned that.

And it was so fucking gross, I have a bad taste in my mouth over a week later.




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