My semi-decennial attempt to finish this book. I made it farther this time, with determination, but despite an attempt every three to five years, I still bounce off it like a rubber ball. Taboo, kink, AND court intrigue in the same book?! This should be exactly my thing! It’s overwrought in a way that makes me weary, though. And I wish the BDSM aspect was… more. More creative. More subversive. More than the pseudo-French medieval fanfic with a dash of mystical Jesus-y stuff and some weird moral judgments regarding kink. (All of Phedre’s clients are bad people; anyone who’s good doesn’t desire the least bit of play in the bedroom. Say what now?) And! Another thing, if courtesans are revered on the level of divinity and a central part of the culture, then why is the language around it still demeaning? It’s hard to turn my brain off and other bits on, is what I’m saying. I think.
(Either that, or I read Tiffany Reisz’s Original Sinners at too impressionable an age. Her take on “kink, but make it sacred”—and specifically “pain, but make it sacred”—coupled with irreverent humor and a thorough theology imprinted on me in a way that can’t be undone.)