Is yet another ropy erotic romance, this time produced by a person who glories in the name of Jamaica Layne. It's a rollicking tale of seduction at what can only be described as the worst LARP event ever.

I discovered it while browsing TV Tropes under their page, "fetish retardant." This is disturbingly common amongst books I review so I figured it only could get worse. I have now read it and actually, to be honest, I'm not sure it belongs here. It seems like a parody of some description. At least, I hope it's a parody of this sort of things. Please, let it be a parody. Please. I doubt, though, that it is, given that it's published by an imprint that calls itself "Ravenous Romance" that seems to take itself seriously... but then has various vanity-publishing characteristics. However, if it is a parody, then it is dead on and utterly hilarious.

I also have found that the author, Jamaica Layne, is apparently the big noise at Ravenous Romance. This does not fill me with much hope.

Executive Summary

Not so much A Song of Ice and Fire as A Song of Vice and Dire.

A bit more detail, please?

Meet Louise Jackson. She is from New Jersey and at a birthday party at which everyone's dressed up in faux-medieval garb. She hates it, especially as it's sponsored by Diet Coke. She's just on the point of going home to have a wank over Sex and the City (no, seriously, she admits as much) when she wanders into the wrong toilet by mistake and meets a Gorgeous Knight. Who turns out to be a Gorgeous Time Travelling Knight and promptly rescues her into the standard fantasy setting from which he's come.

She doesn't know his name, but already is very interested in him. In her own words - "My own crotch goes volcanic." I dunno myself, not having one due to being a gentleman, but if I were a lady and my vulva suddenly started spitting out chunks of molten rock, ash, dust, and carbon monoxide, I'd probably consult a gynaecologist pretty swiftly, because that can't be healthy. He's pretty excited as well, because "that better be a jousting lance in there." Within seconds, yes, they're doing it. And she doesn't even know her name. And let's be frank here - if it were possible to pull desperate American women by claiming to be a time-travelling knight with a giant manhood, I'd have tried it by know. But it gets worse. She describes the act as being thankful and gloating about Carrie Bradshaw's inadequacy, because, "they don't have any time-travelling knights with cocks the size of Nebraska in Manhattan."

Excuse me a second, I need to go and have a little weep. This is hilariously bad.

And then the heroine proceeds to come, twice, while "riding him at a generous canter" and then making of herself a spinning top on his blue-veined custard chucker. Is this anatomically possible? I don't know that it is. Certainly I've never encountered anyone capable of doing that. One would have to... no, that's a different writeup. But this move causes his spunk to "pump so hard into me I can almost taste it in my mouth." Once again, I would add that if by some miracle one's reproductive organs contain a passage that leads to one's oesophagus, I suspect that you may wish to see a gynaecologist. Blood and sand, but this is absolutely atrocious. This is almost as bad as that ska-punk rendition of "The Bear and the Maiden Fair" that the producers ill-advisedly put over the credits of a recent episode of Game of Thrones. And speaking of which, the gorgeous time-travelling knight doesn't even do her the courtesy of licking the honey from her hair, if you know what I mean. Nope. Turns out he's actually Lord Verdigris and he wants to enslave her as an odalisque in his Hall of Harlots!

Anyone who's played the Ropy Romance drinking game now takes a shot.

So let's have a recap. A time travelling knight has pulled a Jersey-born subway ticket-seller in a toilet and has put her into his harem. This is just within the first 15 pages. There's far more to go, and far worse to come (drum fill.) There's yet more beige-prosed anatomically impossible shagging. There's yet more volcanic vaginas which are inexplicably referred to as "lady softness." Sorry, but no. In the real life 14th century, he'd have probably said "cunt." Sorry, but he would. This is because in the Middle Ages, the preferred obscenity was not sex or bodily functions but religion. Gadzooks! for instance, which refers to "God's Hooks" or the nails which fastened Jesus to the cross. Also "zounds" which was "God's wounds," and "bloody," which was "By Our Lady," specifically, the virgin Mary. "Cunt" was just another word for a body part and wasn't as shocking as it came to be later. But that's a different writeup.

Right, on with the novel. We're introduced to her hundreds of competitors by the mistress of the harem. Of note is a "Hermione the Husky" who "likes to put pomegranates up her bum." They're all from different eras of Earth's history. However, we never see any of them again regardless of what we are told about them. Oh dear. And then there's more bonking, this time with a Master Pembroke who is a chap from the Regency period. Yeah. Needless to say, being stuck in a harem with lots of tasty women from throughout history who all bang like the privy door when the plague's in town, there's some gratuitous lesbionics, which are just as badly written as the straight sex. In particular, she gets a fist fuck, up to the wrist fuck, centuries before Rockbitch ever thought of that number. Before Lord Verdigris returns her to the straight and narrow, of course.

Turns out there's a subplot about how other girls in the Hall of Harlots are all conniving to reduce her standing by some way or another. It reads like a first time larper's wet dream. Really it does. Yeah. Then there's the bit where Lord Verdigris returns her to her own time and ends up playing the dozens with a bunch of rather racist caricatures of "gang bangers." Which makes no sense whatsoever, it really doesn't. The fact that the reason for this inauspicious conduct is that Louise's clopper contains a time portal was where I suffered a fatal brain haemorrhage and died in my own excreta.

If I had to sum up this novel in one word, how would I do it? Would I refer to the jousting lance, the anal pomegranate, or the ladyfingers? Or the constant gynaecological alarmingness of all this? Well... no, I'd use none of those. I'd sum it up in this word - "queeb." That's not a typo. It is apparently the noise that her quim makes when Lord Verdigris extracts his John Thomas from it. "A disappointed queeb sound." I cannot possibly envisage how anyone's genitals would make a noise like a flatulent NES at this point. I assume it's a typo and the author meant to put "queef" but that can't be right as surely it would have been corrected in editing. Wouldn't it?

Queeb.

That's what this novel is. A queeb.