Pleasure House by Scarlet Darkwood is one. wild. ride.
Twenty-year-old Rose is caught behaving with licentious impropriety for the nth too many time. Her dad carts her off to The House, a place where men and women with behavioral issues are either spectacularly cured or never heard from again.
Turns out The House specializes in helping people explore their sexual desires. The rest of the novel is quite the education for our young heroine. Pleasure House is a compendium of kinks. Dominance and submission, voyeurism and exhibitionism, anal, menage, oral, medical play, watersports, sounding, bondage, spanking, male-male, female-female, male-female, gay-straight ...Oh my gosh I can't even list all the variations. Well written, graphic but not, I don't know, pornographic - the best way I can describe it is to say a sense of wonder pervades the story. Rose has found a place that accepts who she is and encourages her to be all that she can be. The author revels in sharing all those sexcapades. Despite the cover looking melancholy and dark, it's not actually a dark story. More joyful with a touch of angst.
The House is an fantastical experiment in sexual open-mindedness gone spiraling down the rabbit hole. Inmates and their attendants completely accept each other, are willing to try new things, and are focused on mutual pleasure. I would have liked the author to spend more time on the encounters, with possibly a few less encounters. It felt like we raced through many of them.
I commend Ms. Darkwood on her level of research, and the respect with which she approaches each scene. Much of the book is a few hundred yards to the right of vanilla, but if you're willing to keep an open mind, you'll find much to enjoy, and possibly you'll question the arbitrary societal rules that dictate what's accepted and what's forbidden.
I received a complimentary copy of the book in return for an honest review.