Ellora’s Cave, $4.50, ISBN 978-1419917462
Contemporary Erotica, 2008
Like way too many romance heroines in contemporary romances, Daniella Colbert loves to throw herself at impossible things due to unrealistic, sentimental reasons. In Elyssa Lynne’s story, one with a deceptively intriguing title like Tempting Mouthful, she will convert her Aunty Zany’s rundown place into an inn within five days. Why? Well, this is because her aunt sank a lot of money to open the inn, as part of the aunt’s wish to make a reality her dearest friend’s request. Now that Aunt Zany is in a coma, Danni refuses to contemplate the thought of her aunt finally recovering to discover that the inn thing never came to be.
In other words, we have a woman desperately doing something because another woman wants it to be done, because this other woman desperately wants it to be done in order to please another woman that won’t be around to enjoy the results of the impractical nonsense. For Aunt Zany, she will face utter financial ruination trying to make that dream a reality, while Danni cries a lot and claims that life will have no meaning anymore if she somehow let down her aunt.
Tell me again, why I should be rooting for these imbeciles instead of wanting them to be carted off to therapy or something.
Honestly, even if Aunt Zany hadn’t slipped into a coma, if that old bat couldn’t get things together after all the time she had to do things right in the past, I don’t know what one can do in the next five days can steer things in the right direction. The whole thing seems doomed to failure… oh wait, what am I saying? In reality the whole thing is going to be waste of time and money, but this is romance, a genre where stupid women always get rewarded with hot sex for their brain malfunction, so of course Danni succeeds.
After all, a man, Alec Wallace, shows up, claims that he is Aunt Zany’s advisor, and helps her mostly by getting things done and slipping her the happy banana while she pulls out a tarot card or two, acts like she would have a nervous breakdown whenever she has to do something, and lays back to enjoy the rogering. Seriously, Alec has to be by her side each time she has to get things done, during which she would look wane or pressured, all the better for him to prop her up and give her a good one after her tumultuous experience at having to deal with real life.
I close this story wishing that real life is halfway as good as how Danni has it in this story. On the other hand, Tempting Mouthful feels kind of a pointless waste of time, as it’s a story of a woman throwing herself into a stupidly impractical task only to succeed after minimal effort, because oh thank heavens, a hot man just happens to be around to fix things for her. Am I supposed to cheer for Danni in such a story?
As for the sex scenes, there is such a laughably purple emphasis on Alec’s rampant erection, complete with descriptions of fluid leaking out in anticipation of the inevitable shagging, that the story feels inadvertently Lovecraftian rather than erotic. I love the last sentence of the story.
As his penis throbbed in anticipation and his balls tightened, she did exactly as he asked.
It’s all about the throbbing, leaking, tightening, and spewing that I can’t help but to recall that scene of the poor lady being sexually violated by a giant maggot in the 1981 low-budget flick Galaxy of Terror.
The two of them hang out in just one day, and, perhaps realizing how unrealistic it would be for the two main characters to be so passionately in love by the end of it, the author has the heroine thinking about that very thing, only for Danni to contemplate things for one sentence before deciding that, well, she just knows it’s love, so all you people better believe it or else. Yes, that settles the matter, and now I absolutely believe that these two are truly in love. I’m now off to buy some spells from a witch that will send an aunt into a coma, so that I too can find a leaking, throbbing, tightening true love man of my own.
Anyway, if one can overlook the rather pointless story and descriptions of Alec’s erection constantly jutting into the story in unintentionally hilarious ways, I suppose there may something to be had from Tempting Mouthful. I can’t personally pinpoint what that something is, though, because the whole thing is rather hard to swallow.
