reviews_and_ramblings (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
reviews_and_ramblings) wrote2011-05-08 11:14 pm
reviews_and_ramblings) wrote2011-05-08 11:14 pm
Deviations: Submission by Chris Owen & Jodi Payne
Deviations: Submission is like the 101 course about Gay BDSM Romance; when you are a newbie in the genre, and you are like testing the water, it’s very likely that you will stumble upon this series, or at least it was like that for me. I admit, I was not ready; I remember that I started to read the first book, this one, but I was not able to continue. Pain/pleasure games, 24/7 D/s relationships, flogging, gagging, and on and on, was really too much for me at the time. I realize now, more or less 5 years later, that indeed this series is way more “mild” than other novels I read after that. Both men involved in this relationship, the Dom Tobias and the sub Noah, come along with different needs clicking together. Tobias invested a lot in a relationship with another sub, Phan, but he was not the right man for that job; basically Tobias is a caretaker, he is a vet and he has the need to take care for other people embedded in his behaviour, he cannot really dish out extreme pain, not even if the other man is asking for it. Something that apparently I didn’t catch the first time I read this novel is that Tobias is not searching for a pain s**t, and that, if Noah was one, the relationship between them was never fated to start.
Noah is another character that has his job in his own blood, but in a different way than Tobias; I think that Noah, a police officer, is always so focused in helping other people, in being good and in control, that in his private life he needs to let it go. But for various reasons he has trusting issues, and so he cannot really fully depend on another man, something that is unbearable from most Doms out there. So Noah is going through Doms like someone would go through boyfriends, testing each of them but finding them lacking. Probably the matching between Tobias and Noah is perfect right since both of them actually don’t want to go to the extreme of a D/s relationship, and that is exactly the level of BDSM that I can take.
Another think that I can now appreciate in this series, is that, in the end, the sex between them is more intimate and less “scene”; I really don’t like very much all the public display that most of the BDSM novels imply as ordinary. It’s true that Noah and Tobias met in a private club, and use its facilities, but the sex is mostly between the two of them, so much that they talk about being exclusive almost from the beginning. The story maybe started like a convenient matching of two people searching a good night, but then it soon moves to love and long-term commitment, even if the commitment was enshrined by a D/s contract. But I can see (and I know since this is only the first in a 4 books series) that this relationship is fated to moved beyond this contract and into a partnership looking for more than sex.
http://www.torquerebooks.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=97&products_id=450
Amazon: Deviations: Submission
Amazon Kindle: Deviations: Submission
Paperback: 316 pages
Publisher: Torquere Press (June 26, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1933389850
ISBN-13: 978-1933389851
Reading List:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog_bott
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I don't like it either (talking about RL now), in fact I've never been to a club or a public dungeon because the idea just doesn't appeal to me at all.
That said, I really enjoyed the first two books of this series. It did get much too romantic and sex-centric for my taste later in the series, but the first book and its sequel are ones I'd definitely recommend.
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LOL, I don't know if for me is more a recommendation rather than not ;-) the "too romantic" is good, but the "sex-centric" not so much... I think that I will read them, and decide :-)
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For the record, the 'turn' wasn't anything bad. Without spoiling, I'll just say that I felt the authors made certain things happen that seemed more forced than organic. As in, they had the characters do things because they (the authors) wanted to see the characters do them rather than let the characters do their own thing even if it wasn't what the authors wanted them to do.
Sorry if that doesn't make much sense, Elisa. IMHO, this series was a failed opportunity. OTOH, I know that there are a lot of people who loved every book in the series so, there's that.
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It really worked for me when Tobias showed his more "human" side and let Noah take charge from time to time.
And of course I adore Phan - he is co sweet:)
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Anyway, the whole series appear to be much more "readable" for an average reader than, for example, "Mr Benson" by John Preston, which I still didn't find the courage to read:)
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Anche qui la storia va un po' deteriorando secondo me, soprattutto non ho amato molto la direzione che hanno fatto prendere al personaggio di Tobias, che trovo compleatamente diverso e assolutamente privo di carisma e di quel che che rende un Dom degno di questo nome nell'ultimo libro che ho letto rispetto al primo della serie, dove invece era un carattere molto ben definito, forte e dominante appunto. Insomma, credo lo abbiano un po' svilito e quindi di conseguenza non risulta più credibile nel suo ruolo.
Inoltre non mi è nemmeno piaciuto il modo in cui hanno gestito tutta la faccenda di Phan, ma non voglio dirti di più perchè già ho detto troppo e te magari non ami gli spoiler XD
insomma, tutto sommato mi è dispiaciuto questo decadimento ecco.
Un abbraccio cara ♥
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By the way, I unfriended you, but I put you in my bookmarks folder for reviewers so I don't miss anything. You're just too damned prolific and my flist goes on forever some days.
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