Ellora’s Cave, $6.49, ISBN 978-1419914355
Fantasy Erotica, 2008
Sally Painter’s Divided Love looks like one of those titles lost forever after Ellora’s Cave went under. I can’t seem to locate any revised edition under any other name out there, but feel free to let me know if you happen to know otherwise. It’d be quite a pity if this title were to be lost forever, because it is the perverted sister of The Little Mermaid that nobody has warned me about.
Reci Waters has been living as a human all this while, but if you can’t tell from her name, brace yourself: she’s actually the queen of the sea folks that was forced to abdicate because she wanted to play the martyr. It’s okay if you are confused, as the opening pages will have our heroine and her handmaidens/BFFs basically narrate everything to one another when one would imagine that they already know the details already.
Anyway, since she has been away for so long—actually, more like only a year—she has contracted the “royal curse” that will now force her to split into two different people. No, no, there is no body horror here, as this is an Ellora’s Cave story and not, say, An Atlantean Were-Dagon Creature in London. No screaming as the flesh tear, no ripping of tendons and sinews, nothing of that sort, more the pity. Why is this a curse anyway? Imagine if there were multitudes of hot people to go around, to be distributed equally to every man and woman in need. That sounds like an Ellora’s Cave version of socialist utopia, one in which instead of the green new deal, we have instead the great new di… er, deal.
For Reci, there are now two of her: the boring goody-goody one that, naturally, serves as the protagonist of this story, and a sluttier version. Since she has always had a crush on her Captain of the Royal Guard, Arthur Finn, the slutty one has no problems putting the moves on him. So now, we have a hero being pursued by two identical hot women that want to put out, and… he whines mostly about how he’s always wanted to marry Reci and she doesn’t seem to reciprocate, how sad. Reci is like, oh, does he like the slutty her, or the “real” her.
Seriously, for a story with a premise that is screaming to be a sex-stuffed work of beauty, this one is bent instead to be as boring as possible. The sex scenes are pretty hot, but it’s hard to appreciate them when the boring characters involved in those scenes will proceed to pout and whine over inconsequential things.
A good story draws me in and makes me forget what is happening around me. This one, on the other hand, has me sighing and thinking of what I’d do if, say, I had two Hugh Jackman clones fighting to bed me. You people can bet that I would have the time of my life to such an extent that, like Ariana Grande would say, I’d be here all day all night night that I’d be walking side to side. Who cares whether this one or that one is real? I’ll take both, thank you.
Divided Love, at the end of the day, is… well, it’s readable, I guess. The writing is clean, and there is a train wreck kind of riveting nature to the whole story as I keep turning the pages to find out whether the author would really go all out and let these characters go down to pound town with complete abandon. Alas, in the end, this is one story with a potentially raunch-filled premise but yet is determined to stay as conventional as can be. Who or what reined the author in? Where are the orgies? Where are the inventive sex involving multiple partners and maybe even some fishy appendages here and there? Where is the party?
Chalk this one up as a story that seems to be promising a lot only to deliver a tragically safe and conventional tale. I’m alright with it because, on the whole, it is a painless read of silly people whining and making much out of nothing that is actually serious, but I can’t help also feeling disappointed by it.
