It's only early February and I've already done my first grudge-read of the year.

First, a quick summary of the book. The protagonist, Kate Arnoult is a legal strategist by day, and has a sex-club swinger persona named Gemini Blue that she assumes in her spare time. She's a single member of a "tribe" of married swingers who are all part of the same exclusive Los Angeles sex club. For years, she's adopted this persona and these deep-friendships-with-surface-level-sexual-relationships-on-top to cope with the fact that she's incapable of having an emotionally fulfilling romantic relationship because she was involved in a loveless marriage to a closeted gay man for a year and then lost her beloved parents in a plane crash shortly after. The main story is, of course, the super hot guy she meets who changes everything for her.

If you're scratching your head a bit and asking, "Wait, how does dead parents and a loveless marriage make someone less sexually inhibited but more emotionally unavailable?" ... welcome to the experience of reading this novel, where the reader is asked to suspend their disbelief repeatedly for the sake of some pretty thin character development and plotting.

Let's start with the sex club itself. SANCTM (which appears to be based on what the author's assumptions about what SNCTM - a real sex club in Los Angeles - is like) is an ill-defined exclusive sex club which is basically a nightclub for exhibitionists, swingers, and fetishists. The club and how it works is largely undefined, as are the protagonist's "legal strategy" business, her swinger lifestyle, and a lot of the other details of the book. It's as if the author had elements she wanted to include, but then never bothered to really flesh any of them out, so the work stuff is "business people doing business things" and the swinger stuff is "swingers gonna swing" without a whole lot of depth or detail.

Anyway, Gemini Blue is a rockstar at the club: a single woman with a bangin' body who's up for anything, whether it be dancing topless in a cage, or maxing-out the ten-person limit on the Orgy Bed (yes, it's really called that) on the upper level. It's pretty apparently a wish fulfillment and/or idealization fantasy on the part of the author, who shares a lot of the character's "trademark" qualities (like distinctive red hair, which is mentioned dozens of times), and the character literally considers them different personas ("Kate" the professional businesswoman, and "Blue" the sinful goddess).

It's mentioned that Blue's "secret weapon" is that she's demisexual... and this is where the author again seems to veer into "I like the idea but I didn't actually research it" territory because a demisexual, according to the Cleveland Clinic, is defined as:




Which is a strange sexual orientation for a woman who literally has sex with random strangers at a sex club on a weekly basis. It's also doesn't really fit with the idea of meeting Victor (Vic) Gabriel... a man that she is literally sexually attracted to the minute she meets him (and throughout the story). And yet the author keeps having Blue narrate that her demisexuality is what keeps her lifestyle in careful balance as she's sexually active with multiple near-strangers in the book, and continues to find Vic sexually arouses her with a mere look or few words.




It quickly becomes apparent that both Vic and Blue are working through some hurt in their past, which is creating an impasse in their relationship. This is mostly caused by Blue, who stubbornly adheres to nonsensical rules based on unrelated past trauma (and apparently a profound misunderstanding about her own sexual orientation), while Vic is a bit withholding but still clearly up-front, clear, and honest about where he's at. The resulting effect is Vic appearing to be a perfect guy that's understanding, patient, supportive, etc. ... but then as readers we're asked to sympathize with Blue when she freaks out and acts completely irrationally.

This will-they-won't-they with Vic is interspersed with two other storylines. One is a minor subplot with Blue and her "tribe," which always feels a bit off because the book spends a ton of time having Blue tell us (and other character) how special these couples are to her, but then the author never develop these characters' personalities in the least. By the end of the book, I still couldn't tell you the difference between Nicholas and Rich, or Susanne and Mariana. The other is a subplot about Blue's (Kate's) business where she's representing a major pop star who's been harassed by anonymous trolls online and it's even less developed than the rest of the book. For some reason she hires Vic (who runs a genetics company) to help her track down online harassers, and then it later turns out her pop star client is actually Somali royalty and the harassers are Neo-Nazis. No explanation is given for any of these details, nor is the case resolved by the end of the book. The author just kinda stops talking about it at one point.

So all this said, and even though I could go into much, much more detail... obviously the big picture takeaway is that this book is not recommended.




That said, I have to mention three more things about this book. Call then caveat emptors (caveats emptor? Latin plurals always confuse me ).

First, this is a book with a message... and I'm not sure that message makes sense. It seems determined to shed a light on the world of "swinging" (the ad copy of the book literally touts that it will do for swinging what 50 Shades of Grey did for BDSM ), but I'm pretty sure 90% of the stuff referenced in the book is made up. Blue calls herself a "unicorn" (which means a single person in a swinging situation). She says she practices "ethnical non-monogamy" (which sounds like just regular 'ol nonexclusive dating to me). Blue lecturers other characters on tenets of the capital-L "Lifestyle" at length. Overall, the book has the feel of being a wokescold, existing to constantly remind you that you just don't "get" this world. But I'm not even sure the author or her characters "get" this world based on how superficially and generically it's covered.

Second, and I'm not going to go into too much detail here because the forum is 18+ ... but some of the sex scenes are atrocious. Not in the writing, but in the content. The writing is competent... I'm just not sure that anyone needs this level of detail and description about the volume and viscosity of various bodily fluids. Numerous undergarments are literally ruined with the characters' arousal. There are sexual interactions that are borderline rapey, presented as if that's just what it means to be a passionate lover.

But if you read this and think the sex scenes are bad, the dialogue is even worse. There's so much corny innuendo and bad jokes that the characters then all crack up over when any human being in real life would be rolling their eyes instead. I'm not going to belabor the point, but I will share the following exchange just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:




Creamy pancakes? Ah, there's nothing quite as erotic as salmonella!

Needless to say, anyone and everyone can take a hard pass on this one. I only finished it because it was one of those books where I just kept reading, kept not believing things were unfolding the way they were... and at a certain point I just had to see it through the to end. If you're not under any such compulsion, there are many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, better erotica books out there.

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Created Apr 27, 2025 at 2:43pm • Submit your own review...