Just a Spanking
Lisabet Sarai
Books We Love [link to buy] http://www.amazon.com/Just-Spanking-Dominance-Submission-ebook/dp/B006V2W680/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333805447&sr=1-1
ASIN B006V2W680

Story rating: 3.5 out of 5 paddles

This is playful, high-quality sexy fiction. There are eight stories here, several of which have appeared in other anthologies. I could really have used a table of contents in this one, but that’s an e-book formatting thing, and not something I am grading the anthology on.

I had expected Just a Spanking to be a one-note anthology, and I was okay with that since spanking is a note I really love. The fact that it’s more expansive than that came as a pleasant surprise. The stories are all told from a female point of view. They contain less plot and more action, but they are driven by the characters’ connections to one another, which makes them satisfying. The kink ranges from verbal domination to caning, includes spanking, rope/cable bondage, and some humiliation.

Pick it up if you’d like something that’s an easy, quick read and like your BDSM on the light to medium side with just a few sharper moments for spice. Just a Spanking would be fun to read out loud or share with a partner. My gratitude to the author for the fact that not all the characters are white, able-bodied, young people.

Downsides? Mostly just the ones that come with all short stories: they’re short, so there’s less time to get to know the characters. Hard to call that a flaw, when a good short story does leave you wanting more. The real problem I had was word choice. I realize that diction is a very individual thing for each writer, and each reader has peeve words that they can’t stand, but there were a few un-sexy word choice issues here — mostly of the clinical variety — that kept popping me out of the stories. I will point out that this would not have stood out if everything else had not been so good.