Author: L.A. Witt
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Length: 152 Pages
Category: Contemporary, BDSM
At a Glance: I loved 95% of this book… and then it threw me a curve ball and ended.
Reviewed By: Carrie
Blurb: Their biggest challenge is balancing one’s vanilla with the other’s kink.
Joel has finally walked away from his abusive ex and is ready to meet new people. But that isn’t easy for a guy who’s shy, self-conscious, and struggling with his body image.
Andre has wanted Joel since the first time he laid eyes on him, and finally Joel is single. But Andre is a Dom and a sadist, and Joel is unapologetically vanilla. There’s no happy medium—either Andre reins in the kinky side that took him years to accept, or Joel grits his teeth and subjects himself to kinks that aren’t his thing. No matter who bends, someone’s going to be unhappy.
They agree to walk away, but they keep circling back to each other. Though their kinks might not line up, the chemistry between them sizzles and the emotional connection keeps getting deeper. But none of that will get them anywhere if they can’t find some kind of middle ground in the bedroom.
Review: I love L.A. Witt. I have so many of her books it borders on stalking. I loved the premise of this book, taking someone who was in a BDSM relationship and flipping the norm around by that person realizing that extreme kink is not for them. Taking a person out of an abusive BDSM relationship and having that person self-aware enough to be able to distinguish between the aspects of BDSM in the relationship and what constituted abuse. The concept of someone NOT being kinky is not one that you see often in books these days. The concept of someone being that aware of himself and the BDSM world that he can draw a line in the sand between the D/s relationship and the abuse is intriguing.
Joel has reclaimed his life. He walked away from a 24/7 BDSM relationship with a Dom who was also abusive, and every day he enjoys doing more and more things just for himself. He is taking pleasure in the little things, like eating what he wants and dressing how he pleases. Being isolated by his late Dom, he has no friends outside the kink community—he would like to be social again, but will the people at his old club accept him for what he is now…just plain vanilla? Enter his best friend April, who plays a vital role in Joel’s life and is a catalyst for many of Joel’s personal changes. Even though it seems that every gay male has to have a strong female friend in books these days, I appreciated the way April was written and the support she gave Joel. As a secondary character, she rocks. I would love to have known more about the abuse Joel suffered—we get hints at it but never the full story. I think knowing where a character has come from helps to give that person the depth that I think Joel was lacking for me.
Andre is a tall, dark and handsome, unapologetically sadistic Dom. Like Joel, he knows exactly who he is and what he likes, and it took a lot of self-discovery on his part to get there. Here is the challenge, two men who have taken paths to self-awareness and now find themselves drawn together when they are on opposite ends of the scale with their preferences. However, because Andre has taken this journey, he can appreciate Joel for who he is and what he likes and who they are together. It isn’t an easy road; the two spend much of this short novel pinging off each other like opposing magnets.
The sex in this book is hot, even if it was (not so) strictly vanilla. L.A. Witt always writes great sex scenes and this is no different… Only I felt they were sex scenes not love scenes. I wish this book had been just a little bit longer so that the author could have really set us up for the way the book ended. I truly believe this is a HFN ending; long term, I am just not sure about these two and I that really bothered me. I wanted twenty-five more pages for these two to really work on the dynamic they decide on—which I was not expecting. At all. And which offended all my HEA preconceived notions of how this book should have gone. It is not a bad ending, and the pathway these men choose, while not the norm, is certainly not a bad one, per se. I just wish we had been given some precursors or hints earlier in the storyline.
All in all, Kinky Sprinkles is a great read, and any book which challenges me to accept another viewpoint is a win in my opinion.
You can buy Kinky Sprinkles here:
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