Leisure, $6.99, ISBN 0-8439-5688-7
Historical Erotica, 2006
Burning Tigress, Jade Lee’s latest addition to the Hiya, Wanna Kiss My Chinese Dragon, Babe? series, is unfortunately more of the same old stuff that readers of her previous books in the series will recognize. It is also another “caregiver martyr wanting to learn how to shag” story. If I take away the purple bloated dragons that spew dragon seeds all over the caves thingies, it is just another silly story featuring silly sex involving silly characters.
Charlotte Wicks, the best buddy of the braindead Joanna Crane from Hungry Tigress, is so sad because she has to be the caregiver of her sixteen-year old mentally handicapped brother when she’s not cleaning up the mess her no-good father leaves around the place. I’m sure you know the song she is singing. She will never love another man! So all she wants is just one night. She wants to be a Tigress! Since the Tigress sect teaches that all you have to do to attain immortality is to shag your yin-yang opposite or, failing that, take matters in your hand, I don’t know why Charlotte doesn’t start on the spot with some DIY before graduating to the cucumbers in the pantry or the broomstick if she’s feeling more daring than usual, but then again, heaven forbids a romance heroine that dares to discover her own sexuality without getting a man to do that for her. Therefore she asks our hero, the Japanese-sounding Ken Jin, to show her his dragon and let her play with it.
The first chapter has me laughing out loud when our heroine stumbles upon our hero poking needles into the flesh just above his “immense penis”. How immense is that, by the way? Forty inches? Sixty? And… ouch indeed when the hero quickly pulls on his pants and causes the needles to sink deeper. Let’s just say that there is a wet patch in the hero’s bulging pants and it isn’t a sign of him being very happy. That scene is an indication of how you will either find the book funny beyond belief or immeasurably erotic because the rest of the book is pretty much in the same vein. Some will find the scenes in this book “exotic and erotic” while others will find them “laughable and too-funny”, especially when Charlotte meekly asks Ken Jin whether he wants some bandages after the man’s accident with the needles.
Ken Jin is a dragon, you know, one of those studs that will go to heaven if they boink a tigress, but he is losing his virility because he is unable to hide his dragon inside a crouching tigress. Aww, the poor thing, does this mean that the dragons of China have better start importing white Tigresses from abroad to save the dragons from a lifetime of impotency? He is more than happy to school Charlotte in all the ways his sect can take one to heaven, although the fact that she is the daughter of his boss has nothing to do with his decision, of course. Ken Jin soon realizes that Charlotte is the tigress he is looking for so ooh, everything will turn out wonderfully now. Right?
Well, there is some throwaway external subplot, some psychological baggage that is once again solved in a too-convenient manner, and a romance that is somehow supposed to be right and true despite the fact that these two spend more time making me laugh with their too-funny purple antics and all. Really, there is nothing much to say about this book other than it’s pretty much a rehash of the author’s similar Dragon-Tiger coupling stories in the past. The purple remains purple, the comedy factor remains the same, and the cheese remains standing. Still, I do find myself giggling at some of the more over-the-top scenes in this book – the pins-and-needles scene I mentioned earlier is one of the best things I’ve read to ever make my day, I tell you – so in a way that Jade Lee may not appreciate, I find that Burning Tigress does have its uses. The Tao is right after all – the cause and the effects are aspects of the same one thing, and indeed they are both mysterious and profound!
