Reviewed by Jess
TITLE: Best Lesbian Erotica: From Sweet to Spicy
AUTHOR: Janelle Reston
PUBLISHER: Self-published
LENGTH: 164 pages
RELEASE DATE: April 6, 2018
BLURB: Hot Drinks Press is thrilled to present nine delectable stories of lesbian love and lust by Janelle Reston, the best-selling queen of Sapphic eroticism. Experience shower sex, outdoor loving, BDSM, and a variety of forbidden pleasures. From first-time sexual experiences at a women’s college to the kinky exploits of experienced dommes, these scorching hot stories have something for everyone—even the hopelessly straight.
Advisory: These erotic tales contain steamy, explicit, and sometimes taboo sex scenes. It is intended for adults only. Please read at your own discretion.
Body Shots
A first-year college student goes wild at a party thrown by the women’s rugby team.
Exhibitionism, semi-public sex
An Amish Girl Experiments with Chemistry
Rachel Yoder has long discarded her drab Amish garb for hot pink short-shorts and loud music, but she hasn’t forgotten what she learned growing up — that love is best expressed through baking. That philosophy has made her downtown bakery among the city’s most popular, so she hires Leticia to help her out. Leticia’s learning a lot about food, but she wants to taste more of Rachel’s love than melt-in-your-mouth cinnamon rolls can provide.
Sex at work, masturbation, masturbation with sex toys
Bicycling Puts the Fun Between Your Legs
Two women experience lust—and maybe love—on a long-distance bike ride through New Jersey’s Pine Barren’s to the Atlantic shore.
Shower sex, cunnilingus
Water Air
Miranda is an ordinary young woman resentful of the magic that runs in her family but has skipped her generation. If she had such powers, she certainly wouldn’t be like the witches who descend on her lake resort town every summer, wasting their powers on stupid party tricks.
But when Miranda meets a water witch named Hazel, she starts to wonder if the practitioners of magic aren’t so bad after all. And if reconciling herself to the world of witchcraft means she has a better chance of sleeping with Hazel, well, so much the better.
Outdoor sex, cunnilingus, improvisational sex toys
Making Snow
In this sexy, modern take on the Grimm fairy tale “Frau Holle” (“Mother Hulda”), a ski resort manager falls through the ice and finds herself in a new world of sensual delights.
Masturbation, voyeurism, exhibitionism, cunnilingus
Dance for Me
Miranda Jamison’s submissive tendencies awaken under the rigorous teaching methods of dance professor Hannah Lacey. But Miranda soon discovers not any Domme will do. Only Professor Lacey knows how to break Miranda down, then make her more whole than she was before.
Masturbation, sex on a desk, cunnilingus, light BDSM, restraints, and improvisational sex toys
In a Pinch
Grad students Jess and Kendra have always had a pretty vanilla sex life. That all changes when Kendra overhears Jess making strange sounds behind a closed door.
Sex toys, pain play
Alien Vibes
A couple’s obsession with The X-Files and little gray aliens goes deeper than most.
BDSM role play, abduction fantasy, restraints, medicalized sex play, customized sex toys, enjoyable anal penetration
Wordless Surrender
A Deaf dominant plays with the submissive female partner of her dreams. All About Romance says this story “has an extremely strong sense of character alongside a rapturous sense of love for bondage and dominance that translates well even if you don’t kink to it.”
BDSM, sensory deprivation, restraints, sex toys
REVIEW: Normally, for short story collections, I like to go through and review each story as a separate entity. But as I tried to review each story in this book, it was just a chorus of “I loved this and want more, more, more!” This really is an amazing erotica collection by an author who has mastered the art of concise, scorching sex scenes that still make us invested in the characters and story.
A lot of lesbian erotica still tends to play it safe these days. It’s too vanilla and often leans towards sanitized, porn-friendly version of what lesbian sex actually entails. But Reston’s stories are brimming with women of all colors, sizes, and backgrounds who flirt, laugh, and love one another—all while exploring new ways to get each other hot. She doesn’t shy away from women who are sometimes crude or less-than-ladylike. They’re never just faceless women having sex, they’re good characters with distinct personalities. That’s hard to do in so few words!
My favorite story is “Making Snow,” a clever fairy tale retelling with floaty, sexy dream sequences and an adorable ending. I wasn’t familiar with the source material before reading, but I ended up loving it anyways. I loved the dynamic between partners in “Wordless Surrender” and the fresh take on a student/professor relationship in “Dance for Me.” I also like how Reston includes kinks and sex acts not often seen in lesbian erotica, such as anal play, object insertion, and non-male-gaze exhibitionism.
Even when there were a couple cases of “not my kind of kink,” I wasn’t ever turned off by a certain story or scenario. The nipple pinching/twisting/plucking in “In a Pinch” would make me absolutely cringe in any other situation, but Reston writes it so exquisitely that I can easily see the pleasure inside the pain. And the abduction role-playing in “Alien Vibes” (complete with probe and elaborate costumes) would be a total farce if written by a lot of other authors, but in Reston’s capable hands, it’s a sexy, fun, and surprisingly warm story of embracing an out-there kink with an equally out-there partner.
I enjoyed every story in this collection and eagerly awaited the next when I finished one. It’s an easy 5-star rating for an author who is slowly becoming one of my favorites.
I do agree with the disclaimer, though—this is a pretty hardcore collection of stories, so if you’re just starting out with lesbian erotica, I might wait to read this one a little later in your journey.
RATING: 
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