31 August 2009

The Brass Bed Review

{So here’s what happened. For my Sony test-driving requirement I have to review a Harlequin romance. I wrote the following review, then realised it was a Random House romance I picked up for free. So... my bad. But here it is anyway.}

The Brass Bed
Jennifer Stevenson
Random House
Fantasy

Grade: D+

So in the first few pages of The Brass Bed we are introduced to the idea that there is magic in these here worldly waters. The sky is developing some sort of pink haze/fog and pigeons are smoking cigarettes. Why? I do not know. Me of the future, having finished the book, is there a reason the pigeons are puffing up? No, although the pink fog is caused by road rage and occasionally eats people. So there’s that.

Our main character, Jewel Heiss, has been sent by her not-quite-a-cop boss to follow his wife whom he suspect has been knocking boots with a certain someone (and while he himself has had numerous affairs, pity the wife who does the same). This particular someone is also charging the wife $350 a pop that she’s putting on her credit card as a ‘sex therapist’. Seriously? This is the crack criminal mind that Jewel has been sent to decipher? After telling us that the wife can be “slippery as pup shit”, Jewel then gets her to confess to having mind-blowing sex every time she sees him within two paragraphs.

Then, under some sort of misguided attempt to bring the man in on fraud charges, Jewel ends up in the ‘sex therapist’s’ office where she falls asleep on the large brass bed that the wife has had her ‘experiences’ on. She even thinks to herself that the wife was there not two hours before. And yet, she still lies down.

Our girl is as dumb as a box of rocks.

She does, however, have mind-blowing sex with a swan. In a dream. And while my kink flag flies high, there was nothing the least bit sexy about this scene. Come on, if she’s going to have sex with a swan at least let me get turned on by it!

~ahem~ Uh, where was I?

So, the world moves on. It turns out there is an incubus trapped in the bed until he satisfies one hundred women. Jewel is lucky customer one hundred.

A genie shows up but in typical genie fashion grants your wish in the most cumbersome way possible. The incubus living in the bed gets lost, then found. Jewel starts to fall for the sex therapist. If this seems to be going by fast it’s because so little of it was worth remembering and I don’t want to re-read. Also, very little was worth remembering

Jewel, in the style of cop stories everywhere, gets suspended. Mostly over the whole genie thing. The wife steals the bed which her husband proceeds to destroy. In the interim, she and the hubby make-up before the pink fog can eat them. The bed destroying causes the incubus to take shelter in the backseat of a nearby car where Jewel hops in to have a conspicuous orgasm so that she might again free him..

I could not make this up. Well, I could... but I beg leave to think I could have written it better.

The sex therapist is involved in all of this in a totally contrived way and ends up her partner in the ‘hinky’ division which is exactly half as fun as it sounds. In the meantime, sex therapist is slightly pursuing her for reasons surpassing all human understanding and incubus has to actually love before he is allowed to be free. Maybe.

~deep breath~

And that’s where I quit caring. (Actually I quit caring long before then, but as I thought I was reading this for a review, I powered on.)

None of this is really solved at the end, which promises a sequel The Velvet Chair. I will not be purchasing said book. I can see the wisdom behind releasing the first in series for free. Karen Marie Moning sucked me in with Darkfever and I’ve read what there is of the series twice since in two weeks. But you are no KMM Ms. Stevenson. I appreciate the effort, but yours is a name I will avoid until informed otherwise.

1 comment:

  1. Wow that was odd. I just wrote an extremely long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn't appear. Grrrr... well I'm not writing all that over
    again. Anyway, just wanted to say superb blog!


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