I just finished reading Christine Feehan’s Desolation Road, and I have love hate feelings about it.
Torpedo Ink number 1, Judgement Road was a story I fell in love with. I knew after reading the last of the Sea Haven books and we met Czar and the others, that I would love the series. The darkness of the anti-hero really appeals to me, and I’ve always been a lover of revenge stories, when done right, so I knew bikers who hunt pedophiles would be something that would feel good to me.
While I did love Judgement Road,I found myself disappointed in book 2 and 3. Book 2 because I just didn’t connect with Steele. He’s the VP, and leader of team 2, and the members of it weren’t really on my radar as much as the others because the others were in the Czar and Reapers story more. Book 3 was also a bit disappointing, because of the same reason I have issues with in this one. Which I will now get into.
The Torpedo Ink books are darker than many romances, but I like that. I love it because the main characters are basically anti-heros. Assassins who kill easily and confidently, but they have a code. I love a character wth a strong code of their own. (Dexter, Jack Reacher)
The romance in Desolation Road was richly emotional, very well done, and I loved the heroine, Scarlet. I also enjoy the level of kink in the TI stories, as each hero has his own sort of fetish.
The hate part is that Christine Feehan spends so much of the books saying how fucked up these fetishes are. I get that these particular characters see them as fucked up because of how they were developed – as children who were tortured and raped and trained/programmed to Like these things. That is indeed fucked up because they were children being trained and tortured by evil pedophiles.
However, the heroines also enjoy the hero’s kinks, or they wouldn’t be perfect matches, right? (and in this one, Scarlet is a bad ass herself, and I LOVE her for many many reasons) The big issue for me is how the author always repeats again and again in each story that the kinks are weird, and fucked up, and the women only enjoy them to please their man. That the men are lucky to have found a woman who enjoys either exhibitionism, submission, role-playing or so on. And I hate this. It’s wrong. Having a kink, or being turned on by something different is not wrong or fucked up, as long as it is consensual, and with knowing adults. And in these books, the characters are adults, and everything they are doing to each other is consensual.
In Desolation Road, the heroine feels she is fucked up because she likes to be submissive in sex. She has always been this way, and I get that she feels that way because her college boyfriend called her a freak, and so on, but never once in the whole novel does the author make a point of saying there is nothing wrong with her being submissive sexually. That her college boyfriend was an idiot. The college boyfriend is labeled evil and bad for other things he does, but not for making her feel like a freak for wanting him to take control in the bedroom. That frustrates me to no end.
This story also contains role playing of the kitten play variety. Again, I understand why the hero thinks it’s fucked up, because of how he learned of it, and learned to want it, need it. The author makes a big point of making sure everyone knows the heroine only enjoys it, and does it for him. Nowhere in the story does the author even attempt to make the point that the fetish itself is not fucked up and bad, just the way he was made to embrace it was. It was easier for me to let it slide in earlier books because of the characters, but in this one, both the hero and heroine are supposed to be super intelligent, mega readers and researchers, who love books of all kinds. Which to me, means they should know better.
Even if Absinthe, the hero, can’t let himself understand the fetish itself isn’t fucked up because he will always associate it with his childhood, the heroine should have. These are characters who study psychology books and manuals. She did not have the same fucked up association with the fetish as he did, so she should be educated enough to understand that his desire, as well as her own submissiveness, were not fucked up.
I admit these are issues I’m sensitive to because it’s always a battle to make people realize that not all fetishes are evil or fucked up.
Will it stop me from reading another one of her books? I’m not sure. Probably not. But it does stop me from enjoying the stories as much as I could with only a few small tweaks- say an educated librarian making a point to say that many people in the world practice BDSM and kink in a healthy way.
It also stops me from giving it more than 3.5 stars.