Reviewed by Carissa

 

TITLE:  Knights and Butterscotch

 

AUTHOR:  Faith Ashlin

 

PUBLISHER:  Totally Bound

 

LENGTH:  166 pages

 

BLURB:  

 

A story of modern-day knights, paint-splattered artists and a lightning bolt of attraction that hits hard enough to make a knight think he’s going crazy. And then things get complicated.

 

The year is now, the place is somewhere like here but the feeling is very different. Matti Elkin is a modern-day knight and, while he may not have a horse or a suit of shining armour, he’s brave and true, has a sense of duty and honour a mile wide and a passionate belief in his king.

 

There’s a war on and the knights are fighting hard, but while on R&R Matti is hit hard with an overwhelming attraction for Jamie, a tall, handsome painter.

 

Jamie makes his head spin and his cock harden, and has him acting in ways that make him question his own sanity. But when the war takes an appalling turn, they are both thrown into a world of confusion that has them questioning everything they thought they knew.

 

REVIEW:  

 

When Matti and Jamie see each other, outside a wedding party for Matti’s friend, it is love at first sight.  Not just any love…it is a thunderbolts and butterscotch-whip kind of love.  The kind that comes out of nowhere and sweeps them both off their feet.  The kind that is addicting and sweet and probably dangerous in large quantities–though they crave it anyways.  After only days of wild sex in Jamie’s hotel room they realize that they can’t let each other go.  Not permanently.  So before Matti is shipped back to the front line of war, they get married.  It is impulsive and crazy and not a little risky, but they simply can’t imagine life without the other in it.  But war is not the only thing that will try to tear the honorable knight from his dreaming painter.  With secrets and oaths between them, these two might just find that thunderbolts and butterscotch meetings are not enough to hold them together.

 

I’m a big fan of love-at-first-sight type stories.  If they are done right.  There is just something about watching life unfold after ‘first sight’ that I find so entertaining.  Because no matter what happens when the guys first meet, life is always more complicated and messier than can be overcome by a simple I Love You.  It is what comes after the thunderbolt that attracts me.  It is the struggling to find a place in each other’s lives.  It is the realizing that life is not rose-colored.  It is the falling in like, after love has already been declared.  When it comes down to it, love-at-first-sight is just as messy as the long slog through maybe and want and can this really work? that comes in all other stories.  They just get the order a little mixed up.

 

If there is one thing that I really like about this story it is the interactions between Matti and Jamie.  The whole scene when they first meet is really great.  You can really feel their instant attraction as well as their confusion as to what exactly is happening to them.  Neither of them expected to look up and simply fall.  And fall hard, fast, and permanently.  But the way that they seem to be pulled like magnets is great, especially when they kept trying to resist and talk some sense into themselves.  I also really like how after a while they actively tried to make their relationship about more than just the sex.  That they start to talk, and then to go out, and try and make some type of foundation for this crazy emotion that came out of nowhere and smacked them upside the head.  If they hadn’t tried to be more than just hot sex on legs for each other, there is no way that I would have believed them weathering the issues that happen in the second half of the book.

 

However there is a lot of sex in this book and while it was incredibly hot and enjoyable to read, it began to feel like scenes between bedroom antics were simply there to move them to the next time they could get their clothes off.  I think this mainly came from the fact that for the first half of the story, Jamie and Matti were only able to see each other when Matti came back from the front.  The frantic need to reconnect when they have so little time with each other is understandable, but because we only saw them during those few days where Matti comes back, it was like that was all that was important to the story…when in fact there was a damn lot going on in the story that we never got to see.  And a damn lot that we needed to see, but never did.

 

(The next part is a bag and a half of SPOILERS.  There is simply no way to talk about it without spoiling some pretty big surprises so if you don’t want to know you should probably skip down to the bottom, now.)

 

One of my biggest problems with this story is the fact that the parts of the story on either side of The Secret Revealed–finding out that Jamie is Jari, the lost prince–simply don’t connect in a lot of ways.  There is no build up to the reveal, and it made it feel very fake.  And that is not even going into the fact that Matti basically drops the fact that Jamie’s dad is dead and his brother in critical condition, and Jamie doesn’t even react.  Shock is one thing, but we get nothing.  It is almost like Jamie is as shocked that he is the prince as Matti is.  Whenever Matti talks about the king in the first half of the book, Jamie doesn’t have any reaction, no emotional pull; it is like Matti is talking about some figure on the TV, and not his father.  I get that Jamie left the royal life behind, but he still talks to his family, still cares about them, but we get none of that emotion, that connection.

 

The fact is that because the first section of the book was so focused on the sex that the characters had no time to actually become real.  They were simply two guys who liked to fuck.  There was no real hint of Jamie who is Jari, who really is Jamie the painter.  And Matti is simply a soldier obsessed with his king.  An obsession that I never really understood.  We get pages of how great the king is, how great a leader, how kind a man…but it is all filtered through Matti’s hero worship so it never reads as truth.  Had we actually got some interactions between the two, if King Godric hadn’t simply been an off-stage character that everyone knows but we never see, perhaps I might have understood Matti’s slightly odd, and maybe a little creepy, obsession.  I think it was supposed to have read like the fealty between knight and king in the middle ages, but it felt off balanced in this world.

 

(This is the END of the SPOILERS)

 

I never got this world, really.  I had problems trying to place this country (was it supposed to be England?) and had no clue who these invaders were supposed to be, or what they wanted.  Everything felt incomplete, and half-constructed.  We get The Godfather movie references, and there are cars and phones, and tanks…but it also tried to create a world where Knights and Kings and honor and fealty were real, tangible things.  Which was certainly an interesting idea, and made me want to read this book, but because we never get a good idea of this society and this world, it is mainly confusing and bland.

 

To be honest, half this book reads like a PWP (porn w/o plot).  And when the plot finally does show up it makes little sense in context with the first half of the book.  The character never really have a chance to become more than stereotypes till the end of the book, and by then it really is too late to make much of a difference.  And while I really love the sex scenes, there were way too many of them.  Had the book taken a few more risks, and not pulled a few of its punches, it could have told a great story and not just a titillating romance.  But if all you are looking for is a nice story about two guys falling in love, this might just be the book for you.  I think I’m just not a PWP kinda gal.  (Probably something more like 2.75 stars, but going to round it up to 3)

 

RATING:  

 

BUY LINKS: Totally Bound Amazon Are