Title: The Compound
Author: Claire Thompson
Publisher: Romance Unbound Publishing (30 Jan 2013)
ISBN: 978-1482302493
Reviewer(s): Michael & Jane
Bondage! BDSM! The Beatles! And, no, that last one’s not a typo. In this joint review of The Compound, Michael and I get a bit rock ‘n’ roll. (I know, I know, I know. Just go with it.)
*Proceed with caution: spoilers ahoy-hoy
JANE’S TAKE …
Completely confused by the presence of the Fab Four in this review? Don’t worry, all will become clear as mud, I promise.
Take a sub who can’t let go (Alexis) and send her to a strict BDSM bootcamp, one that specialises in whipping bottoms into shape (pun intended):
Give her a trainer, John (not the hero), who’s hell-bent on getting results, dammit!:
Throw in John’s colleague, Paul, who’s busy writing a very catchy song called Hey Jude. Wait. No, sorry, wrong Paul (I think). Throw in John’s colleague, Paul, who sees Alexis and develops a thing for her:
Get Alexis to lust after Paul but spend 80-90% of the book being put through a whole load of unsatisfying pain play by big bad John:
Let Paul and Alexis shag in the final few pages (note the man wearing handcuffs at 0:19 seconds in this video! Bondage! Beatles! BDSM!):
This one started out with such a hiss and roar, I was expecting to be a hot sweaty mess by the time I’d finished reading it. ‘Michael!’ I was practically shouting over email. ‘This is hot! And I’ve only read the first chapter! Awesome choice!’ Er, yeah. As you may have guessed, those sentiments didn’t last:
@Michael Okay. Time out.
I’m about 90% of the way through now. And I’m ticked. I’m ticked off with John who, if he’s the Sub Whisperer everyone says he is, should know better. I’m ticked off that I’ve read most of this book and Paul is still spectating from the sidelines. Grow a pair of ben-was, dude.
The first few chapters I thought I was going to get a Roissy-style deal. Then, from the three-quarter mark, I’m suddenly reading a Mills & Boon.
And the love at first sight? You had me at flogger? Gag. (Just to be clear, I’m talking about the reflex, not saying that a ball gag would have had any bearing on the whole love thing.)
Lastly, the tying. Where is all that rope going? You know what I’m going to be drawing, don’t you? Those bondage scenes, trying to figure out exactly how our intrepid heroine is positioned.
Shutting up now.
You good?
Michael, at this point, raised a very interesting question:
@Jane: Were you like me, and waiting for Master George and Master Ringo to show up?
That was all the encouragement I needed to start going bananas with Beatles clips. In fact, there was so much singing and tapping of feet going on I forgot to draw any stick figures.
In all fairness, The Compound was perfectly acceptable from a writing point-of-view but the contrast between the heavy play and the soft love story was just too jarring for me. And I have to admit I spent a lot of time Googling and asking various online friends about some of the breast caning scenes it contained; they seemed very severe at times and I was left wondering about Alexis’s safety during them more than once.
Lastly (and this is just a general observation more than anything else), what is it with all the duplicate cover images these days? They’re everywhere! Seriously, erotica publishers are in sore need of more stock libraries to source their images from …
MICHAEL’S TAKE …
Alexis is a masochist. She really enjoys pain. But something is missing and she isn’t quite sure what that something is.
Part of the problem is that she wants more of an experience. The kind you can’t have playing in the public area of a BDSM club with other people rubbernecking. Or at least she can’t. Part of the problem is that the only Dom she has really clicked with is Arthur. Who is married. And while his wife is okay with him playing in public, the deal is no going behind closed doors.
So the opportunity comes up for her to spend some time at … The Compound (insert ominous music here and maybe an evil laugh). For a slave training operation, it actually has kind of a resort atmosphere; while some residents apply to attend, others are sent by someone they’re already in a relationship with. No one is there against their will. The point is to make the various ‘students’ better submissives/slaves/people than they were before.
Alexis is a bit of a problem child. Right after she arrives she spots the man of her dreams. And then gets assigned to someone who is anything but (Jane explains the name thing in her review). And John finds her a bit of a conundrum.
I don’t know when the dirty suspicion came to me, but after an uncounted time of lying in a heap, I suddenly knew another fact of the conditioning I was being put through – and the difference between my training and that of the others. All the hints and unexplained happenings … The bastards were building a link between pain and sexual arousal and satisfaction.
If that quote sounds odd for this story, that is because I borrowed it from Mind Guest by Sharon Green. The way John describes what he wants to do with Alexis at one point brought this to mind. But the funny thing is it doesn’t work. What Alexis needs is something that John and Paul (and George and Ringo) once explained:
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so not a winner then?
sounds like neither of you particularly liked this and were left feeling unsatisfied?
missed the drawings Jane, sorry but there are only so many Beatles clips one can watch!
Lol! The music video bonanza was a bit of an off-the-cuff thing – don’t worry, the stick figures will be back!
Re. the book itself … the writing was good but the character interactions just didn’t work for me. There was some hard action and then some very soft stuff that just didn’t seem to blend/meld together very well. And I really wanted more meaningful interaction between the hero and heroine much earlier in the story. The breast caning also had me sitting up and clamping my arms over my chest. It seemed a lot harder at times than was safe but maybe I was interpreting the scenes as more severe than they were …
I actually would have liked for it be a little darker. Jane didn’t mention it but this was the book that prompted her recent rant about Contracts. Forcing Alexis to meet the terms would have added a bit more drama but it didn’t really play into the ending.
The solution wasn’t Deux Ex Machina but it was close.