Punish Me, Please Me by Ashley Zacharias
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Having a hard time with this review and had a hard time with the book itself. I got this because it was the Erotica groups free download for this month. And I'm stubborn enough to keep reading something because I started it. The author states herself that this is a collection of work written over a two year period and are presented in the order they were written. You can clearly see Ms. Zacharias' skill as a written increase with each story. But with the exception of the final story which I actually enjoyed I found the rest of the stories to be very disturbing and very dark. If you like a story with HEA or even a HFN this collection of stories would not be even remotely close. But I ended up giving the book a 3.0 rating. While it was not my cup of tea it was well written and as I said the writing got progressively better as the story went on. But as I finished the whole collection of works some of the conclusion I came too were interesting. This work was not so much a collection of erotic tales but had more the flavor of an intellectual thriller. The lines between victim and abuser seemed to blur and even shift through the story. As I read through the stories I found myself asking who is the real "criminal". The abuser, the almost willing victim, the person who manipulated the situation in the first place, or maybe society and our views as a whole. For this reason despite its dark and disturbing subject matter there was still a pull to think about not so much the actions of the story but the motivations and thoughts behind them. So I wouldn't want to read another collection quite like this one again but it was an interesting mind game anyway.
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