Deviations: Submission by Chris Owen & Jodi Payne

[reviews_and_ramblings]

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_bottom.php?tag=reading list&view=elisa.rolle

Comments

[catana1.livejournal.com]

I read the whole series, and although each book had something to recommend it, there was much more emphasis on sex later on, and even some public to semi-public scenes. I'm another one who really doesn't need the sex, especially when it's blatantly public. I'm much more interested in the development and interplay of characters, and that became watered down as the series went on. Some readers hated Phan's trip, but that was one of the more interesting ongoing themes, for me.

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

I liked Phan, so I wouldn't mind to read more about him in the ongoing books. I will probably read book 2, will see how I like it and decide for the others, but comment after comment I realize that probably 2 will be enough for me ;-)

[catana1.livejournal.com]

My memory is horrible, but I think Phan's crisis doesn't even find a solution until past the second book.

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.

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

I don't mind, I tend to post only once a day, but with the awards and all, for the following few months the numbers of post will probably increase