Reviewed by Jess

TITLE: Both Ends of the Whip

AUTHOR: Brenda Murphy

PUBLISHER: NineStar Press

LENGTH: 186 pages

RELEASE DATE:  May 7, 2018

BLURB: Octavia Vargus had everything she wanted at Rowan House, Skye’s most exclusive pleasure house, except the one thing she craved. Longing for the freedom to explore both sides of her nature, she leaves Rowan House and her mistress, for a new start in Italy with her partner Bridget Murray.

Vivian Abiola is a connection to a past Octavia would like to forget, and a love she never expected to see again. After Octavia’s past relationship with Vivian is exposed, Octavia and Bridget explore the limits of their desires with Vivian. When an arsonist threatens to destroy their vineyard, past loyalties and secrets endanger their lives, and the three women’s relationship. Their love may be the only thing that helps them survive the firestorm of doubt, intrigue, and jealousy.

REVIEW:

This a very unique type of erotic BDSM story with a unique dynamic between three women. I ended up enjoying the way they all worked together to figure out their wants and needs, but by the end, I was burned out from way too many sex scenes and not enough emotion between Octavia, Bridget, and Vivian.

If you like your erotica very heavy on the sex scenes, you’ll like this one. And there is a lot of good stuff going on, especially when Vivian takes control of both her subs. There are liberal amounts of strap-on use, impact play, and orgasm control, which are all very well-written. But the sex is so frequent and so long that I often had to pause to remember where the actual story was at. I had to remember who was fighting with who, what they were actually doing before they started having sex, and why they ended up where they were in the first place. The pacing and placement of the love scenes, especially the ones with heavy BDSM, were often clunky and didn’t help the story flow. Even in the beginning, I had trouble nailing down the setting. I couldn’t tell if the formal BDSM setting was a world-building thing or even a historical element until about a third of the way through the book.

Octavia’s inner monologue ended up grating on my nerves after a while. It consists of mainly one-word exclamations—mine, now, please, fuck. It gets very repetitive and doesn’t serve to give her a distinct voice. Instead, it just feels like her thoughts never get much deeper than sex, and she often jumps to conclusions without communicating. And when negotiating a polyamorous BDSM relationship, there needs to be a lot of communication. In the end, I do think we got a lot of good scenes of all three women talking frankly about what their expected from each other, but those conversations needed to start way earlier for me to get invested in them.

I think a lot of what I disliked about this book came down to Octavia’s point of view. For a woman who seemed dead-set on upending her and Bridget’s lives for love, she seems pretty clueless about basic BDSM etiquette, like safe-words and proper pain-play. She flies off the handle too easily with both Bridget and Vivian, often being cruel to them before trying to communicate. But worst of all, her character totally lacks warmth. Vivian and Bridget are both very warm and affectionate characters, but when they’re with Octavia, it all seems to ice over. I never got past her chill to really fall for the dynamic between all three women.

If the book was in either Vivian or Bridget’s POV instead, I think I would’ve fallen into the story a little more. They are both interesting women with a lot of depth. But my dislike for the main character and the surplus of sex scenes in lieu of actual storyline makes this one mostly a pass for me.

RATING: 

BUY LINKS: 

Amazon

NineStar Press