Foreign Exchange

The Concubine Chronicles #1

by Vanessa Cardui

While attending university in exotic Ralaath, Liera fell in love with Lady Maash. Now she moves in Maash’s rarefied circles of artists and landowners, nobility and libertines. Liera’s learned enough about Ralaathi customs to get by under most circumstances, but she doesn’t know what’s expected of her when Maash lends her to her friends the Krin and Lady Jalah.

Luckily, Lady Jalah—a jeweler who’s as expert in the art of tormenting young ladies as she is at shaping metal and setting stones—is there to take Liera in hand. Liera is decorated and restrained, kept in a constant state of pain and anticipation, as Jalah trains her to serve herself, her husband the Krin, and their friends. By the time Liera returns to Maash, she’ll have a thorough education in the more twisted side of Ralaathi customs, and a better understanding of her own hidden desires.

Genres: BDSM

102 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 6, 2015

Reviews

[David Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well done

So much fun! This young woman goes through so many changes. She plays so well with others. Intense and interesting. Well done.

[Crevele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantasy pseudo-India ‘harem’ setting. The enticement of unacculturated women into conditions of absolute servitude, as ‘second wives,’ under the care and tutelage of their mistresses. Highly skillful, fetishized rendering of how a profound condition of human subjugation can be finessed by an aristocratic culture into an activity of great intimacy, delicacy, and refinement. Dark suggestion of the perverse allure—the uncomplicated and intense belonging—that lies in self-abandonment of this kind.

I have a lot more general praise for the author, not all of whose works are listed on goodreads:

Cardui has a ferocious appetite for the violent absolutism of human desire and a masterful capacity to spin its implications into uncompromising works of erotic fiction. The resulting dramas—of enticement, resistance, conquest—nearly always end in a state of total power exchange: the absolute fulfillment of total ownership; the absolute annihilation of total ownership . This is her apocalypse of human desire. The vividly rendered fantasy settings that her books are situated often in allow for deeper—either mythological or historical—engagement with these dynamics: the untrammeled natural compulsion of animal instinct; the civilized disciplinary cruelty of institutional slavery; sometimes the catastrophe of when they are combined.

Most writers flinch at the evocations of these socio-historical forces. Cardui does not. Her doms are intent on warping, ravaging, transforming, the objects (subs) of their desire, for the sake of their malformed but also powerfully expressive gratification. Typically they will succeed with only a small ray of hope for the sub left in the distant and unclear future. The process has always a sort of twisted aesthetic, a simultaneous mockery and apotheosis of civilization: a reworking of the natural human organism into more refined and specialized form more capable of service.

Cardui’s works are predominantly lesbian fictions; the brutality has a distinctively female coloration. Do we learn something about women, about the extremities of feminine desire, through these imaginative fictions? Hypothesis: the natural sterility of lesbian sex—lack of fertilization of the ova by the sperm—calls for perhaps more culturally refined creativity from the female sadist: for more complex social humiliation, for more civilized cruelty, as an alternative source of (self-)creation.

Many of her works are solely accessible here: https://archiveofourown.org/users/van...

The Sorceress Enslaved (a great work) only accessible here: https://www.smashwords.com/extreader/...

[Discfan2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked the world building on this one. This is apparently the first in a related world series. This book follows Liera. She is 'owned' by Lady Maash and is lent out. Lady Maash doesn't follow all the old ways (training, discipline, bondage, etc.). When Liera is lent out she is trained in the old ways and discovers she likes it.