BMBR (Smut Week): Rachel Van Dyken

This week, and oh how I'm going to try to do a review a day, is all about Smut. Or, what I like to call foreplay. If it kills brain cells, reads like an eight grader who's failing her English class wrote it (see last post), or makes me groan (and not in a good way), it's not good Smut. If it's well written (but not over-written for it's genre), has some great tips that would make "Cosmo" blush, and makes me want to jump my husband at any point while I'm reading it, it's good Smut.

Here we go.

If it weren't for the fact that I inadvertently started with the third book in Rachel Van Dyken's Eagle Elite series (Elite, Elect, and Entice--I think that's the order) and so ended up paying for it and the first one, and therefore felt like I had to keep reading, Elite probably wouldn't have made it past the Sample Stage (these are on my Kindle).

All of these books are somewhat rife with (minor) grammatical errors and some continuity issues, both of which usually kill a book for me, now matter what the story is about.

And yet, I fucking devoured them. As in, I couldn't put them down. I was a bad, bad girl at work.

And, oh my goodness, as I was reading them I realized that they followed Jennifer Crusie's Sex Scene Rules. That's right, the sex scenes were pretty much only descriptive when they meant some sort of character or relationship development. At all other times they were implied. The former happened more than the latter, but hey, who am I to complain.

Holy shit. I did not see that coming. Not only did I not see it coming, I didn't see it when it jumped in front of me, waved its arms, and yelled "Ooga Booga!" really loudly. I didn't see it until the third book. Probably because I thought I was reading Erotica more than I was reading Romance. Turns out, it was Erotic Romance. And then when I saw it, I was stunned. I thought I was stupid. But then I just realized that I was distracted. By all the great sex (and not just in the book). And the story, actually. Which, weirdly enough, was written in such a way that even when there wasn't sex, it turned me on. As in, I was already good to go when I jumped my husband, and that happened often enough that I know that he won't mind my buying the next installment.

So yes, they are worth the 3-5 bucks per e-book.