Cate Rayner

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Cate is Currently Reading

Cate Rayner is currently reading

The Danger of Beauty (Nadine Wolfe Trilogy, #1)

by G.A. Tierney (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: literary-erotica, literary, dark-romance, dark, net-galley, thriller, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in May 2026

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Cate Rayner said:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

" This book has a surprising amount of depth despite being very explicit. It’s sexy, unsettling, dark, and genuinely thought-provoking. A lot is going on beneath the glamorous veneer.

What hooked me early was the structural foreshadowing. Nadine, a succ This book has a surprising amount of depth despite being very explicit. It’s sexy, unsettling, dark, and genuinely thought-provoking. A lot is going on beneath the glamorous veneer.

What hooked me early was the structural foreshadowing. Nadine, a successful high-end fashion model, is introduced by reading the 1967 novel Emmanuelle. This is key, and I knew it as soon as I read that part. I love a good clue like that. I read Emmanuelle in college a long time ago, but I recognized the plane scene immediately, so I knew this was significant.

For context, in Emmanuelle (1967), the protagonist travels east into an expatriate community in Bangkok and toward sexual liberation, decoupling sex from romantic attachment under the encouragement of her older diplomat husband—then, the novel moves forward through this erotic discovery.

Danger of Beauty reverses nearly every part of that framework. Nadine is flying *west*, not east, a clever way to tell the reader we're moving in reverse in this book. Instead of moving abroad toward found family, self-discovery, and forms of liberation, Nadine is returning home for her mother’s funeral after her mother’s death. The emotional direction of the novel is increasingly claustrophobic.

Where Emmanuelle (1967) frames its older male figure as permissive, progressive, and liberating, Edmond functions almost as his inverse: Edmond, a stepfather-like figure who alienates Nadine from her mother after her father’s death, exacerbating the wound of his grief, then commodifies Nadine’s sexuality for his own business interests. It’s a different kind of possession, the opposite of Emmanuelle’s older, diplomatic, non-possessive husband. Meanwhile, Nadine's stepbrother is obsessed with her. Either of these is a candidate for the evil Jean part (if I'm right), so we will see as the series progresses.

Structurally, the books move in opposite directions in time. Both starting in the present, Emmanuelle unfolds progressively forward into experience and freedom, while Danger of Beauty gradually reveals contextual layers from the past that reframe the emotional dynamics of the present.

The novel is also *loaded* with foreshadowing, especially for those familiar with the 1967 novel. That makes Nadine's dressing in her mother’s clothes and gradually taking on her role become increasingly unsettling—especially because we know early on that her mother dies by suicide.

What makes the Emmanuelle parallels especially interesting as it relates to the Danger of Beauty, is that the original novel's "happy ending" is actually deeply inappropriate. The protagonist's "sexual liberation" crosses a line into sexual predation. In the novel's final scene, the 18 or 19-year-old FMC has sex with a 15-year-old boy, which is framed as the "climax" of Emmanuelle’s erotic awakening.

If Danger of Beauty is consciously mirroring and reversing the 1967 novel, it raises immediate questions about what “reversed revelation” may still be buried in Nadine’s past. If the pattern holds, then what Emmanuelle frames as sexual liberation may become, in Nadine’s story, the origin of her sexual captivity through emotional and psychological conditioning.

The novel builds an unsettling atmosphere, but we don't quite know why, except that it has something to do with sex, money, family, and secrets, which leaves a lot of possibilities open.
The eroticism here isn’t just for fantasy or shock value. It’s being used structurally and symbolically. I liked the way the sex scenes were written, too. The narrative architecture is deliberate, and the parallels are doing real thematic work.

I think literary erotica might be becoming one of my favorite genres when it’s done like this: sensual, psychologically loaded, symbolic, and thematically ambitious.

I can’t wait for book two! ...more "

May 24, 2026 02:26PM · see review