Tag: prostitution

05

At Any Price (Gaming the System) – Brenna Aubrey

At Any Price (Gaming the System)Title: At Any Price (Gaming the System)
Author: Brenna Aubrey
Publisher: Silver Griffon Associates (13 January 2014)
ISBN: 9781940951010
Reviewer: Jane

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I used to work in the videogame industry. I won’t go into detail, but suffice to say, when At Any Price (Gaming the System) came to my attention earlier in the week via a link in this post by Skye Warren, I was immediately intrigued. My mind began to whir. Was the heroine going to get ‘serviced’ next to the servers? Would the hero decide to ‘review her build’ during the daily Scrum meeting? In my experience, game dev. is a whole load of (stressful) fun, but calling it sexy would be … a stretch, to say the least. Unless you count listening to hundreds of emote .wav files to make sure they don’t sound unintentionally orgasmic, getting shot (repeatedly) with Nerf guns when you tell the dev. team they need to fix a bug the night before manufacturer submission, asking the rigger to make a character’s boobs smaller, and informing the lead artist that the creature he’s spent the last few days concepting needs to look ‘less penis-like’.

However, it turns out that the videogame backdrop for At Any Price (the first in a series of three books by author Brenna Aubrey) is more peripheral than integral, despite the references to patches, servers and avatars. It’s true that Adam, the hero, can code like a god (apparently, he’s the Zeus of C++) but it’s his addiction to his mobile and laptop, rather than his association with MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing) game development, that ultimately define him in Ms Aubrey’s story. Continue reading →

03

His Sugar Baby – Sarah Roberts

Title: His Sugar Baby
Author: Sarah Roberts
Publisher: Siren Publishing, Inc. (04 October 2011)
ISBN: 978-1619263956

I almost didn’t buy this book because of the title. I guess it’s the images and connotations that the terms ‘sugar baby’ and ‘sugar daddy’ inevitably conjure in my head – none of them particularly positive. (Yes, yes, I realise I’m being judgemental.) Thankfully, His Sugar Baby surprised me. It wasn’t a sickly sweet tale of an overly-indulged heroine who does nothing more than have sex with a man for superficial gain. Nor was it a boringly straightforward ‘destitute woman meets rich man and they fall instantly and unrealistically in lust’ story. Rather, it was an exploration of a mother’s unconditional love for her child and what she is prepared to sacrifice – physically and morally – to protect her offspring.

Cathy Somerset is a single parent in an awful situation. Her only child, Chloe, is suffering from cancer and when we meet her at the beginning of His Sugar Baby, she has reached breaking point – financially and emotionally. Her health insurance cover has reached an end, her job is no longer able to provide enough income to sustain her daughter’s treatments, and she barely has the cash to buy food and pay rent. Quite simply, Cathy is drowning beneath the relentless tide of her daughter’s mounting medical bills and crumbling with the stress of caring for a seriously ill child without the support of a partner. Desperate times call for desperate measures. To her own disbelief, she responds to an online personal advertisement:

 

‘Mature Sugar Baby wanted—I’m seeking a slender, attractive woman, 22-34, for a friends-with-benefits arrangement that will provide you with up to seven Benjamins per week or about three grand per month.’ Continue reading →