Erotica Archives — Keeping Up With The Penguins

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Icebreaker - Hannah Grace - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Icebreaker – Hannah Grace

August 13, 2024 / Sheree / 0 Comments

#Bookstagram made me do it! I’ve been scrolling past fellow fans of spicy reads raving about Icebreaker for nearly two years now, and they wore me down. I’m finally giving this college sports romance a go!

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Icebreaker has all the hallmarks of a #BookTokSensation novel. There’s the cutesy cartoon cover that belies the spiciness of the content, the shameless marketing of the trope contained therein (“frenemies-to-lovers”, as one of the characters actually describes it in the narrative), and a helpful playlist of Vibe-appropriate songs in the front. It’s sold over a million copies worldwide, so the formula clearly works!

The story is told through chapters alternating the points of view of the romantic leads. Anastasia is a figure skater at the University of California, Maple Hills, with her sights set on an Olympic medal with her skating partner Aaron. But he’s not the hero of this story: that would be Nathan, a hockey player headed for the NHL after graduation. They’re thrown together when a college prank goes wrong and puts the hockey training rink out of action for a season. Figure skaters and hockey players collide, and sparks fly.

Anastasia and Nathan have a series of antagonistic-but-sexually-charged encounters, before finally consummating their situation at a rowdy party (romantic, eh?). Anastasia is mortified by her lack of self-control, and tries her best to avoid Nathan, but naturally the plot keeps throwing them together. Her skating partner becomes increasingly jealous, and when he gets injured off the ice, he blames Nathan. Nathan is innocent, but cops the blame anyway to stop it being directed elsewhere.

Icebreaker gets a bit convoluted from here, but it boils down to Nathan offering to fill in for Aaron as Anastasia’s skating partner until his injury heals, and their relationship develops in leaps and bounds as Anastasia realises that her partnership with Aaron isn’t as healthy as she once thought.

My fellow #Bookstagrammers weren’t lying: the spice in Icebreaker is excellent. Grace includes only the bare minimum of ice skating and hockey talk, basically using the sports simply to pad out the sex and the lovey-dovey bits. I was very grateful to Grace for avoiding the sports info-dump, and focusing instead on the A+ banter and tension.

I did have some trouble keeping all of the hockey players on Nathan’s team straight. There seems to be a lot of them (granted, I don’t know how many players are actually supposed to be on a hockey team, so maybe that’s normal?). Henry was an absolute gem, my favourite side character, so he stood out, but the rest of them blurred into one at times. I was particularly frustrated by the choice to have a character named Robbie and a separate character named Bobby – that just seems needlessly confusing.

Speaking of Robbie: Icebreaker has possibly the best representation of a wheelchair user that I’ve seen in contemporary fiction. Robbie is a full and contributing part of the team as assistant coach, and his team loves and respects him rather than treating him like a mascot or an object of pity. His spinal cord injury is explained without being turned into a tragic back-story or used as fuel for a main character’s development. He is a well-rounded character, a love interest in his own right(! which is all too rare for characters who live with a disability), and his use of mobility aids and specific accessibility needs are simply a fact of his life. Honestly, my hat goes off to Grace – even if the spice hadn’t been on point in Icebreaker, I’d be singing her praises for Robbie’s depiction alone.

It wouldn’t be a #BookTokSensation novel if it didn’t at least nudge some potentially-triggering topics, so here’s a content warning for disordered eating. Also, if you like to see manipulative man-boys get their comeuppance, you might need to temper your expectations, because Aaron gets off pretty lightly after a prolonged campaign of gaslighting, coercive control, and narcissism.

Overall, Icebreaker is a completely unrealistic wish-fulfillment spicy romance novel, and I won’t have anyone disparage it on those grounds. It does exactly what it does on the tin, and it does it well. It’s a delightful, satisfying read – one million #Bookstagrammers can’t be wrong!

My favourite Amazon reviews of Icebreaker:

“i genuinely think the one direction fanfic i wrote when i was 13 was better than this. and my fanfic involved me driving off a cliff and coming back as a ghost to haunt niall” – jhanvi
“It was okay but literally threes no plot it’s just intercourse.” – Good👍
“I have no words, I am baffled at how far human literature has sunken to this abhorrence of the english language. I can sit through a lot, and I mean a lot, and if put me in a room with this book and locked me in, I would commit heinous crimes.” – lily n

Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows - Balli Kaur Jaswal - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows – Balli Kaur Jaswal

April 23, 2024 / Sheree / 0 Comments

If the title of Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows doesn’t catch your eye, I don’t know how to help you. Knowing nothing else about this book, I knew I had to read it. Somehow, the title raises a bunch of questions, but at the same time it does exactly what it says on the tin. Brilliant!

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If I had to sum up the thesis of Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, I’d say it’s: every woman has a hidden life, and every community has things they don’t talk about. Sometimes, those secrets collide.

Nikki is a twenty-something woman living in London, straddling the worlds of her immigrant parents and her modern contemporaries. She’s a bit directionless (as twenty-somethings tend to be), having dropped out of law school to ‘find her passion’. That search has taken her to a small apartment above a pub where she works a few nights each week, much to her family’s chagrin.

Nikki’s sister has chosen a different path: a respectable profession (nursing) and entering into the marriage market. She asks Nikki to post an ad on a Southall temple message board for young people seeking arranged marriages, and there Nikki finds an intriguing ad of her own. The Sikh Community Association is seeking a creative writing teacher to teach story writing to women – and Nikki, out of curiosity more than anything, takes the job.

But this is Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, so I’m sure you can guess that the storytelling workshop doesn’t work out exactly the way Nikki expects. The proper Sikh widows who attend the class are barely literate, and they’re expecting to learn the English alphabet and grammar, not narrative perspective and literary style. They soon discover, thanks to a gag gift they discover on Nikki’s desk, the world of erotic stories, and realise they’d have a lot more fun telling their own than learning their ABCs.

The erotic stories these Punjabi widows tell aren’t just wink-wink euphemistically sexy – they’re straight up spicy. It turns out these women are hiding a lot under their white dupattas. As the women delve deeper into their fantasies and the radical act of openly communicating their desires, Nikki grows concerned about the community’s reaction to her classes – specifically the Brotherhood, the young men who style themselves as the ‘moral police’.

The title of Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows might mislead some readers (it misled me, I’m not too proud to admit it) into thinking this is purely a comedic novel, an older-women-behaving-badly romp with lots of literal lols. It’s definitely entertaining, but it’s also meaningful, and there’s a lot of depth to it if you’re reading it as a feminist text. It’s a book about how women experience and express desire in cultures that are policed by men. It’s about sexuality as a source of confidence, both in and out of the bedroom. And it’s about the power to determine one’s own life, and pursue one’s own happiness.

I particularly appreciated the diversity of the arranged marriages depicted in Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows – both how they happen, and how they turn out. For a long time, the dominant Anglo narrative about arranged marriages was that they were universally awful (especially for women), and shackled two people together for life, site unseen, simply because their parents said so. Then, as far as I can see, there was a bit of an over-correction, and we had a run of stories about modern arranged marriages that worked perfectly because the couple fell in love for real. In Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, there are both very traditional arranged marriages and more contemporary and flexible arranged marriages, ones that work well and ones that don’t. More diversity in our perspective and understanding can only be a good thing, and this book definitely contributes to that.

Reese Witherspoon picked Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows for her reading list in 2018, and it’s easy to see why. As she said, it’s “a mystery, a romance, a family drama… and yes it’s 🔥 🔥 🔥!” – total Reese catnip.

Read Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows:

“too raunchy to be interesting” – M. Edwards
“just silly. misleading title to entice buying.” – KAVANJIT SINGH
“The book had romance and murder! Would recommend” – sam
“The so called “Erotic Stories” didn’t blow my skirt up.” – I Can Tell

Story Of O - Pauline Reage - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Story of O – Pauline Réage

March 5, 2024 / Sheree / 0 Comments

So, it turns out spicy books aren’t all best-selling romantasy and cartoon covers! Story Of O is classic smut, the O.G. 50 Shades Of Grey, and I can guarantee it pushes the envelope farther than anything you’ve read lately.

Story Of O - Pauline Reage - Keeping Up With The Penguins — Get Story Of O here.
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Story Of O (or Histoire d’O, in the original French) is an erotic novel first published back in 1954. Pauline Réage is a nom de plume, the pen name for French author Anne Desclos, who didn’t reveal her true identity until 40 years after it went to print. Having read it, I can kind of see why. You wouldn’t want your Mum knowing this is the kind of stuff you write about!

She wrote Story Of O, she said, as a “love letter” to Jean Paulhan, a man who deeply admired the work of the Marquis de Sade (which tells you just about everything you need to know about him, hmph). Apparently, Paulhan didn’t think that a woman could write smut as well as Sade. When Réage proved him wrong, he was so impressed, he sent it on to a publisher.

The translator isn’t named in my edition, which annoys me to no end. I looked into the publication history, and it would seem that the first English translation was completed by Baird Bryant and published in tandem with the French edition initially. Then, an improved English translation by Austryn Wainhouse appeared in 1957 (under the title ‘Wisdom Of The Lash’), and then a new translation by Sabine d’Estree for the American release in 1965. I’m pretty sure that last one is the version I’ve got, as it seems to be the most widely available today.

Alright, enough dancing around it: Story Of O is a tale of female submission, revolving around a woman’s indoctrination into a BDSM chateau called Roissy. Réage doesn’t give a lot of context for what draws O to that lifestyle, beyond her being in love with a man who’s into it. Roissy is kind of like a clubhouse for a secret society of men who… I’m really struggling to put this delicately. They have the “right” to use inducted women any way they like. Any way they like.

Clearly, Story Of O was written before explicit and enthusiastic consent became sexy. Réage gives us insight into O’s willingness to participate through the narration, but the characters don’t seem to know (or care) for sure whether she’s into everything that’s happening. There’s certainly some stuff going on that O isn’t thrilled about, but she always inevitably submits. She also takes a liking to a fashion model, Jacqueline, and does her darnedest to seduce her into The Lifestyle, too.

I must say, a lot of the spicy content was kind of off-set by the formal language. It’s definitely more funny than sexy to read a dildo described as “an ebonite rod fashioned in the shape of an uprisen male sex” (page 37).

Unsurprisingly, Story Of O attracted a lot of criticism, especially from feminist writers. Réage was accused of ‘glorifying the abuse of women’, a criticism commonly leveled at BDSM practitioners and those who write about them (there’s a lot to say on that subject, but this isn’t really the time or the place). They even overcame retorts that O undeniably consented to at least some of what happened to her by claiming that a ‘pornographic society turns a woman’s heart against herself’ (Susan Griffin).

French authorities brought obscenity charges against the publisher; the charges were ultimately rejected by the courts, but they upheld a publicity ban for several years. Given that Réage (i.e. Desclos) was hiding her identity, she probably wasn’t going to be doing book tours or press events anyway, so that worked out.

But, as so often happens, the storm of controversy simply got more people interested in Story Of O. It was widely read and discussed (over a million copies sold worldwide), but it never quite reached the cultural penetration (ahem) of other classic smut texts like Lady Chatterley’s Lover – I suspect because it’s so brutal that many readers simply can’t stomach it. I reckon it would be an interesting read for people with a specific interest in BDSM psychology, and/or the history of erotic texts… but as a spicy read, or as an instructional text, Story Of O falls short in many respects. It’s definitely not one for the mildly-curious recreational reader.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Story Of O:

“Various reviews suggest this is some how an erotic classic of high regard. I submit that is pure crap, and not worth the slightest effort.” – himself70
“I’ve read BDSM stories before but this one was truly disturbing. I mean 50 Shades of Grey was silly but at least that chick got shoes, clothes and jewelry out of that mess. In the quite sad story of o, the main protagonist doesn’t get squat and actually, doesn’t even give the impression that she’s enjoying the sex. She’s just in it because people beat the sense out of her every time she protests. And that’s just the first part of the book. In the second part, her sense of self has completely disappeared and she is an object with no will of her own, no feelings, no opinion. Blank. Compared to her Bella (the high school dropout who was into dead guys in those books) and Anastasia (the idiot from the shady trilogy) are Misses Personality. Anastasia would gush: “OMG! Christian Grey wants to whip me…. But I’m a 22 year old virgin who hasn’t gotten a spanking since… Well, ever, actually. And he did say he wanted to see me bleed… That can’t be good… But then again, it is Christian Grey… Look at those abs, look at that jazz, my my my… Okay, fine… I’ll do it.” And Bella would probably bawl “I didn’t know what love was until I gazed into your soul less eyes. From this moment on, Edward Cullen, thy wish is my command. Thou shall never walk on earth like a regular dude cause I will put you on a pedestal and kneel at your feet so you can walk allover me every single day of your never ending life.”
O on the other hand… She is not in love with her “lovers”, they are not in love with her either. The guy just goes “It’s such a beautiful summer day today… The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, nature is in bloom. It just makes me want to beat you senseless. O, my love, go get bullwhip. I want to paint 50 shades of red on your back” and O hurries to get the instrument of torture, making sure she picks the biggest whip in his arsenal. That’s just how they roll.
It is not about submission and dominance. Rather, it’s about a sadist who was lucky enough to find a girl with a high threshold for pain, a good health insurance policy, no shame, no self esteem and no feelings.” – Reika Nogami
“There is some very weird translation in the book. For “belly” please read genitalia/ vagina. For “womb” read… I’m not sure. There is a lot of womb-grabbing going on, which is simply not possible.” – Foxglove Summer

Happy Endings - Thien-Kim Lam - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Happy Endings – Thien-Kim Lam

May 31, 2022 / Sheree / 0 Comments

If your taste in rom-com books tends towards the smutty (like mine does), then your ears will prick up when you hear the premise of Happy Endings (like mine did). A sex toy salesperson has to team up with her restaurateur ex-boyfriend to make her dream of opening her own shop come true. But will their chemistry bubble over and spell disaster for them both? It’s a steamy, second-chances romance about unfinished business, good food, and homemade orgasms.

Happy Endings - Thien-Kim Lam - Keeping Up With The Penguins — Get Happy Endings here.
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Meet the players: Trixie Nguyen, sex toy salesperson extraordinaire with a passion for empowering women to own their Os and a desire to prove herself to her traditional Vietnamese parents, and Andre Walker, who has recently inherited a flailing soul food restaurant from his mother and is struggling to keep the wolf from the door.

Years ago, when they were both living in New Orleans, they had an intense romance… until Andre left Trixie, with just a “I’m sorry, I can’t, don’t hate me” Post-it note by way of explanation. (What a guy!)

Now they’re both living in Washington DC, and (of course) they unexpectedly run into each other when Trixie is selling vibrators at a party hosted in Andre’s restaurant. The night is a smashing success for both of them, and there the (brilliant!) idea of pop-up sex toy shops alongside soul food buffets is born.

Both Trixie and Andre feel the weight of others’ expectations, albeit in different ways. Both are desperate for business success, believing it to be the key to their happiness. Both of them feel they have something to prove to their parents. And both of them are hot-hot-HOT for each other, even though they know it’s a mistake to mix business with pleasure. It makes for a very, very steamy novel, just like I like ’em. Now, that’s just my personal taste; if you’re liable to clutch your pearls at an exposed breast, this is not the book for you.

(Or, actually, maybe it is. Happy Endings is sex-positive, pro-pleasure, and full of encouragement for those who might need it. Lam clearly believes, as does Trixie, that pleasure is for everyone, regardless of gender, size, age, or inclination. So, you know, maybe don’t write it off completely, even if that’s not usually your jam.)

It may seem like I’m revealing a lot here, but the first few chapters of Happy Endings (well, most of them, if I’m honest) are exposition-heavy. You don’t need to read between the lines one bit.

Another bummer: as a Coeliac, I couldn’t help but cringe at the fairly frequent jibes about gluten-free restaurants. Lam used them throughout Happy Endings as a symbol of the evil gentrification that Andre was so desperate to defeat. I tried not to let it bother me, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t. His fried chicken sounds delicious, but would it really be worth days in a sick bed or hunched over a toilet bowl (not to mention a shortened lifespan), when I could get a decent GF feed up the road? Hmph.

But other than that, Happy Endings was a delight to read. The blurb maybe overstates the stakes a little (they’re comfortingly low), and there’s a cast of supportive, empowering characters that keep the mood up. All told, it’s a fun second-chance romance with a sweet message and (as the title suggests) a happy ending for all involved.

P.S. Lam is clearly an awesome lady, too. As well as writing books herself, she founded Bawdy Bookworms, a subscription service that “pairs sexy romances with erotic toys”. I checked immediately whether they deliver to Australia (they do!) and immediately put a subscription of my own at the top of my wishlist.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Happy Endings:

“Happy Endings was the perfect book for my Vegas trip. It held my attention over all the noise of a pool party.” – Kendra Pierson
“The only downside? There is a lot of talk about food and it made me hungry. Other than that, it was an excellent read.” – Tegan H.
“Andre is kind of a stick but he will grow on you.” – kathleen g

Delta Of Venus - Anais Nin - Book Laid on Wooden Table - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Delta Of Venus – Anaïs Nin

April 20, 2021 / Sheree / 0 Comments

Not to be indelicate, but Anaïs Nin was basically the original cam girl. Delta Of Venus is a collection of fifteen erotic short stories that Nin originally wrote for the “personal use” of a “private collector” back in the 1940s. She was paid a dollar a page, after Henry Miller turned down the assignment at the generous rate of $100 per month; luckily, Nin earned enough to bankroll the smut Miller wrote with his “integrity” intact. The stories weren’t published until 1977, after Nin’s (and the “private collector”s) death.

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Feel free to scroll down if you want to get straight to the review, but I can’t resist the opportunity to give a bit of biographical detail about this oft-maligned trailblazer before I get started. Nin’s first book, a defense of D.H. Lawrence (yes, of Lady Chatterley’s Lover fame), was published in the 1930s. It made her a fixture on the literary scene, as did her vivacious personality and her boundless generosity. Still, she didn’t get the attention she deserved from mainstream readers and press until much, much later.

Her exploits in literary erotica, as I mentioned, gave her the capacity to fund the work of the middle-aged, impoverished, would-be writer Miller; he went on to be lauded for books like Tropic Of Cancer, while Nin remained relatively unknown. She also funded the dreams of countless other down-on-their-luck male writers the same way. She made their careers possible, but effectively none of them saw fit to open any doors for her.

Nin self-published four books, managed to sell a few others, but for the most part she was either mocked by critics or (worse) ignored. Today, she is best known for work she probably thought would never see the light of day: Delta Of Venus and, of course, her private journals (which were just as steamy).

The blurb for Delta Of Venus promises “a stunning collection of sexual encounters from the queen of literary erotica” (so you can see why I picked it up, right?). The preface, taken from Nin’s diaries, explains that the collector for whom she wrote “likes it better when it is a narrative, just storytelling, no analysis, no philosophy,” (page viii). Basically, he told her to write all the arty shit she wanted in her own time, and stick to the sucking and fucking on the pages she submitted to him. Nin rose to the challenge, but being told to focus only on the sexy bits led to “violent explosions of poetry” (page xi). She drew on her own and her friends’ experiences, like an old-timey Carrie Bradshaw, and gave them as much literary flourish as she could get away with.

And, yes, we now know the identity of this enigmatic horny benefactor: Roy M. Johnson of Oklahoma (1881-1960), who made his fortune in oil. These men, honestly…

Delta Of Venus definitely has a different “vibe” to Miller and Lawrence, whom we might now consider to be Nin’s contemporaries. She really penetrates (ha!) the psychology of sex, as I presume it was understood at the time. She consciously inserts the sensual and the feminine into the story; as she wrote in her own diary, through this project she “realised that for centuries we had only one model for this literary genre [erotica] – the writing of men,” (page xiiii). She conceived a “language of the senses”, according to the academic types who have all-too-recently actually paid close attention to her work.

Not to contradict myself, but I must warn you that the collection definitely throws you in the deep-end of an icy cold pool: the first story, The Hungarian Adventurer, involves (among other things) graphic depictions of incestuous rape. Don’t confuse sensual and feminine for delicate or fragile! Some of the stories in Delta Of Venus have aged particularly badly (e.g., The Boarding School, which features abuse and gang rape in a Catholic institution), and all are problematic in some measure (by today’s standards, anyway). My advice? Don’t pick this one up if you have any sensitivities around sex or gender or violence that could be triggered by graphic un-woke descriptions of all of the above.

Still, I didn’t hate it. I was surprised, at times I blushed, but I wasn’t as sickened as perhaps I should have been – I was certainly never bored. The quality of Nin’s prose, her mastery of language and insight into desire, doesn’t excuse the challenging content but they make it damn readable.

Plus, my deep-rooted sex positive feminism simply can’t divorce the content of Delta Of Venus from the context in which it was produced. Nin wrote explicitly about sex in a time when doing so was the sole purview of rich white men (and the irony of a rich white man paying her to do it is simply too delicious to ignore). She wrote about abortion, extramarital affairs, all manner of “inappropriate” desire, without judgement and without fear and without diminishing her characters (something that many writers struggle to do today).

Had Delta Of Venus been published for public consumption at the peak of Nin’s “career” (which is not saying much), I can’t even imagine what would have happened to her. She would have been pilloried, by the public and the press, and either died a notorious martyr or a penniless nobody. In that view, we’re lucky to have access to this crucial work today, and it’s worth a read… if you dare.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Delta Of Venus:

“Not as erotic as Playboy would have me believe…” – J.J. SPANO
“some seriously disturbed stories. child rape isn’t my favorite.” – JS
“I suggest a more accurate title for this book, “Bored with Copulation” by Inane Nincompoop.
Don’t expect this shoddy diary to enhance your bag of sexual tricks to surprise your lover.” – Where Waldo?
“it is a collection of short stories which I don;t reaaly care for. I would rate it as rather trashy! no comparison to 50 shades trilogy” – Cybergrammie

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