Book Review - Daddy's Game by Normandie Alleman

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Daddy's Game

Five Stars!

Daddy’s Game is a wonderfully engaging, sweet, sexy book.  I am so pleased I read it because I almost didn’t.

Although, I adore Normandie Alleman’s spanky pirate books, I avoided reading any of her Daddy’s Girl series for a while. I’m not really into age play and having ‘Daddy’ in the title did put me off. Why bring dads into it? Dads aren’t sexy! Well, my dad certainly isn’t. (It’s possible my mum might disagree with that but I’m not going to think about because parents + sex = ewww.). You know how it is with kinks that aren’t your kink. They always seem a bit weird.

I am not going to bang on about my age-play bafflement. I don’t want to come across like one of those people who leave reviews on my favourite books saying “I liked the romance in this story but it was ruined by the hero continually turning the heroine over his lap and spanking her. Why did he keep doing that?” I just want to respond to the review saying “Because spanking makes everything more awesome, do you see?”

Daddy Morebucks and Daddy’s Game aren’t really age play stories, anyway. Although, the books’ heroes like their ladies to call them ‘Daddy’, the sugerdaddy/sugerbaby dynamic is more about the characters enjoying a relationship at the sweeter end of the BDSM spectrum than about any child/parent role-play. There are definitely no diapers in here.

I enjoyed Daddy Morebucks but I’m going to concentrate on Daddy’s Game in this review. Partly because I read it more recently but mostly because as a love story it is just about perfect.  Not only is it well written, it contains two of the best drawn, most believable characters I’ve come across in an erotic novel. The heroes, Carmen and Natron grow and develop throughout the story in believable – and not always expected – ways. Natron is a successful American Football star. When he sustains an injury which prevents him playing for months and threatens his entire career, his and Carmen’s responses to it – both good and bad – are credible and engaging.

Americans refer to this simply as 'football'. They're wrong, of course.

There’s quite a lot of sports talk in the book. As I made clear in my review of Katherine Deane’s The Coach’s Discipline, I am really, really not into sport. You’d be hard pressed to find someone less into sport than me, in fact. So I am afraid that I skimmed through some of the more sportsier passages in Daddy’s Game. Once you start talking about quarterbacks and scrimmages and pass plays, I just zone out. It’s not like I’m ever going to learn the rules. I haven’t learnt the rules of real sports; I’m not going to bother with a ridiculous made-up sport like American Football.

Admittedly all sports can be considered both ‘real’ and ‘made up’

While I might not have understood any of it, the sporty aspects of the book provide a nice background against which the drama of the story can play out. Natron’s high profile career as a professional sportsman contrasts nicely with Carmen’s job as an artist. It showcases Natron’s personality as a high-achieving forceful man whose competitive edge drives him to go for the things he wants.

The sex scenes in this book are super hot as the pair enjoy all manner of dom/sub sexy fun. There was a pony play segment which I did find a little weird. Not the bridle and ponytail butt plug which was fine but the post sex scene in which Natron has Carmen lick his spunk from a bowl. I felt a little bit queasy at the thought of it. If I’m dealing with a gentleman’s bollock yogurt, I want it to fresh from the source, as it were. Once it’s been sitting around, congealing in a bowl, it’s rather unappetising.

Still, you can’t fault the characters (or Normandie Alleman) for their inventiveness.

I loved spending time with Carmen and Natron. As people, they were far from perfect. Often their behaviour made me want to bang their heads together and then give them a jolly good talking to. “Natron, stop taking your frustrations out on Carmen. Carmen, stop leaping to conclusions. Both of you, talk this through.” But you know what, that just made me like them even more.  Relationships aren’t always easy and the difficulties Natron had to overcome were real enough that I’m prepared to give him a bit of slack. Ultimately, the real reason I got frustrated with them was I cared about them so damn much. I really, really wanted things to work out for them.

Normandie Alleman has paved the way for plenty more books in this series. The ‘Daddy’s Little Girl Club’ – a group of girls which includes Carmen from this book and Marley from Daddy Morebucks – has plenty more submissive sugerbabies with stories to tell. I can’t wait to hear them.

Book Review - The Coach's Discipline by Katherine Deane

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First rule of Running Club. Nobody talks about Running Club.

     
  Five Stars!

The Coach's Discipline is an utterly lovely spanking story which tells the story of runner Claire Jacobs. It is set in a world of competitive off-road running, fitness coaching and Olympic tryouts which on the face of it, is not my cup of tea all. Cups of tea are my cups of tea.  Marathon training is something else entirely.

It turns out that my lack of interest in sport really wasn’t an impediment at all to my enjoying this book. Which is a relief because I am so not into sport. Not even slightly. I am always a bit baffled by how much people get into it to be honest. Not so much the doing of it – I appreciate that there’s endorphins, senses of achievement and self-worth, increased life-expectancy – you know if you’re into that sort of nonsense.

I don’t understand why people want to watch other people do it though. Not something I’ve felt the inclination to do, to be honest. The Olympics happened round these parts a couple of years ago and I managed to miss it entirely despite the fact that bits of it were happening a stone’s throw from where I’m sitting now. (Not a literal stone’s throw. Not if I were throwing, anyway. If we’d had stone-throwing teams at school, I would have been picked last.)

It did strike me before I started reading that a fitness trainer was very much the perfect guy for a BDSM-ish spanking book. Doms and personal trainers tick all the same boxes. They demand obedience; they push people as far as they can go while remaining conscious of their limits and they cause pain. Lots and lots of pain.

Also, there's this sort of thing.

Based, presumably on my horrific experience with PE teachers, I was expecting Claire’s coach, Nick Fox to be something of a monster. Turns out he’s actually a total sweetie. I mean sure he’s  all about barking commands, and enforcing discipline but his absolute devotion  to the girls in his running squad and especially towards Claire is so touching that I found myself wanting to reach into my Kindle and give him a  big hug.

I really love the author's writing style, particularly the way she handles the switches between Claire’s and Nick’s points of view. While Nick handles his and Claire’s relationship – both personal and professional - with a calm alpha authority which is a hot as hell, it’s lovely to hear his thought processes behind it including his own doubts and vulnerabilities.

They are such a cute couple.  Their banter is just adorable, particularly when Claire teases her man, although she usually has to pay the price for that. You know what I should include in these reviews? Some kind of spankings to things-that-aren’t-spankings ratio. Maybe like those traffic light food labels.

Some kind of kinky version of this.

That way you’d know at a glance if it was a straightforward romance with a couple of playful taps or one massive non-stop spankfest with no room for characterisation or plot development.

I don’t know how many spanking scenes there were in the book. There were a pretty good number and the spankings/things-that-aren’t-spankings ratio was absolutely perfect. There was a real heartfelt story here with Claire’s personal journey at the heart of it. There were some great secondary characters including the other girls form the running squad, Claire’s best friend Jenny and a mysterious guy called Oz who I’m hoping is going to get a book of his own at some point. Meanwhile, Katherine Deane includes lots of opportunities for Nick to bend Claire over something and give her the spanking she needs.

Claire’s not the easiest of girlfriends; she has lot of personal baggage including an emotionally abusive mother and a history of bulimia. Sometimes she needs encouragement, sometimes she needs discipline and sometimes she just needs someone to hold her and remind her to breathe. Nick is absolutely the perfect man to do that.

And while a lot of the sportsing references went sailing over my head, I did appreciate the book’s many references to movies - including quite a few with spanking-related themes. I love films. What I lack in any kind of fitness regime, I more than make up for with my ability to sit in a darkened room watching stuff. I want to give some kind of award for including a reference to the Castle Anthrax scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Nice to know that I probably wasn’t the only person who had a couple of jokey throwaway  lines from a comedy film seared permanently into their brain after watching that.

"You must tie her down on a bed and spank her. You must spank her well, and after you are done with her, you may deal with her as you like... and then... spank me."

 "And me. And me too. And me."

 "Yes. Yes, you must give us all a good spanking. And after the spanking... the oral sex."

This is Katherine Deane’s first solo book and she has certainly hit the ground running*. I am really, really looking forward to whatever she writes next. It’s not that often that you encounter a book which had you laughing out loud one minute, blinking back the tears the next and then becoming incredibly hot and bothered by the sexy, sexy descriptions of two lovely people getting to know one another in the best possible way** a minute or so after that. Katherine Deane delivers all that and more, here.

She sounds pretty knowledgeable about the sports side of things too which will probably make it even more enjoyable if you’re actually into that sort of thing.

Although, to be honest, I’m not sure I could have enjoyed this book more than I did. It was just about perfect.

* Hahahahahahahaha! Hit the ground running! I didn’t even do that on purpose! I’m like some kind of punning genius!

** For the avoidance of doubt, the best possible way is spanking, obviously. Sex comes second.