Review: Reflected in You by Sylvia Day

Picking up where the very adult and very, very sexy Bared to You left off, the second volume of the Crossfire series initially dazzles readers with its account of the sinful sexual lives of the rich and beautiful, before simmering into a tale of how two emotionally damaged people make their first attempts at forming a lasting relationship. Eva is nervous about her relationship with Gideon, while he is protective of her to the point of obsession--and just how far that obsession goes is very strongly at hinted toward the end of the novel.

Reflected in You is a difficult book for me to describe in much detail because until the last hundred pages or so, the novel is pretty thin on plot. Despite the fact that she can write a damn good erotic scene and with a lot more class than many of her peers, Day pleasingly puts all of that aside and pulls a couple of plot threads together to reveal a did-he/didn't he ending that suggests just how deep Gideon's need to protect Eva may be. His morality is questionable, of course, but books of this type rely on the fact that the reader does not know which side he is on until the very end. Despite the fact that is undoubtably a book that will please fans of the Crossfire series and frustrate fans of hardcore erotica, I found that it was lacking a certain element which would have made it a winner for me. Despite some dark themes, the plot felt rather shallow at times and very incidental to the story until the last hundred pages or so. More for fans than the casual reader.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more