As She’s Told

by Anneke Jacob

Book Review by Ashley Lister

Appropriately enough, for the Valentine’s month of February, As She’s Told is a love story.  Set in contemporary Toronto, Canada, Anders and Maia meet briefly through an internet chatroom and then make their first face-to-face contact during a convenient munch.  They both feel a strong connection when they meet.  That connection grows more powerful very swiftly.  It isn’t long before the casual reader discovers that this is a couple who deserve to be together.

However the course of true love never does run smooth and every love story needs a complicating action.  In Gone With the Wind, Rhett and Scarlet are kept apart by the American Civil War.  In Romeo and Juliet the title characters are separated by the senseless feuding of their embittered families.  In King Kong, the eponymous hero never gets to be with his girl because his penis is the same size as the bus she rides to work.  In As She’s Told, Anders and Maia struggle to develop their relationship because they’re both into BDSM.

Anneke Jacob’s story is rich and powerful.  Anders and Maia are a couple who are described with loving and delicious detail.  Their relationship is hardcore but never unbelievable and it is always grounded in a well-crafted reality.  The Toronto they inhabit is a three-dimensional world that is deftly envisioned and perfectly realised.  I’ve never been to Toronto however, after reading As She’s Told, I believe I could find my way around the city blindfolded. 

Maia has a natural tendency to submission.  Perhaps this is understating the situation – or perhaps Maia is just too honest about her own needs for me to make that distinction.  You’ll have to read the book and work that one out for yourself. 

Anders is a very capable dom.  He has an instinctive ability to know what Maia needs, but enough humanity to doubt himself.  Those inner doubts make him appear vulnerable, humane and loveable.

The fact that both these characters are not native Canadians – Anders is descended from Danish stock and Maia’s heritage has taken a circuitous route around the world – provides another clue to the complicating action of this story.  Even though this couple have managed to find each other in Toronto, and even though they are accepted by a wide social circle of family and friends: they remain outsiders throughout the story. 

It would be difficult for any BDSM enthusiast not to enjoy this story.  The characters leap off the first page and develop into rounded individuals for whom the reader knows, loves and cares.  Their situation is in turns frustrating, amusing, passionate and complex – the same as every conventional well-told love story.   

Ashley Lister
February 2009

As She’s Told by Anneke Jacob
(Pink Flamingo; ISBN-10: 0352341874)
Available at Pink Flamingo

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© 2009 Ashley Lister. All rights reserved.


About the Author: Ashley Lister is a UK author responsible for more than two-dozen erotic novels written under a variety of pseudonyms.His most recent work, Swingers: True Confessions from Today's Modern Swinging Scene (Virgin Books; ISBN: 0753511355), a non-fiction book recounting the exploits of UK swingers, is his first title published under his own name.
Ashley’s non-fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines, including Forum, Chapter & Verse and The International Journal of Erotica. Nexus, Chimera and Silver Moon have published his full-length fiction, with shorter stories appearing in anthologies edited by Maxim Jakubowski, Rachel Kramer Bussel and Mitzi Szereto. He is very proud to be a regular contributor to ERWA.
Websites: www.ashleylister.co.uk / ashleylister.blogspot.com

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