Quintessentially Q by Pepper WInters (book review by Efterpi)

Author: Pepper Winters

Publisher: CreateSpace

Release Date: December 13th 2013

Series: Monsters In The Dark #2

Pages: 376

Rating: 5 stars

Buy on: Amazon

Add on Goodreads  

All my life, I battled with the knowledge I was twisted… fucked up to want something so deliciously dark—wrong on so many levels. But then slave fifty-eight entered my world. Hissing, fighting, with a core of iron, she showed me an existence where two wrongs make a right."

Tess is Q’s completely. Q is Tess’s irrevocably. But now, they must learn the boundaries of their unconventional relationship, while Tess seeks vengeance on the men who sold her. Q made a blood-oath to deliver their corpses at Tess’s feet, and that’s just what he’ll do.

He may be a monster, but he’s Tess’s monster.

 REVIEW:

For those of you that considered Tears Of Tess a dark and twisted book then you should not read this one. This is a much darker, twisted, painful book that you can possibly imagine. I had to stop reading at some parts just to get myself together from the shock, to register the fact that I was actually reading that particular scene or paragraph.

The book continues where Tears of Tess left off, we read one of the hottest sex scenes and I felt like everything would be okay in this book. Everything would turn out alright and Tess with Q would be able to do what they swore to each other.

The writing was great, the author did a great job with the point of view of Q and to be honest with thought and talked the way I had pictured him doing in the first book, so thats a plus for the story, when the author can actually sense what her fans need and deliver it. She also did a really good job with getting my heart ripped out of my chest.

Tess is being kidnapped under Q's nose and I wont spoil anything to you, I will just warn you that what you will be reading is games and fun, love and romance. It's violence to its extreme to the point that I panicked thinking even for a minute what trafficking victims go through. The only thing that I will tell you is that Tess will go through the 9 circles of Hell and back. As for Q, Q broke my heart into a thousand little pieces.

The writing like I said before was so good and this time the author gave Q a rather more animalistic side entwined with love for Tess. It was a scary narration since we see what a human can actually do if he has the means to take back what was taken from him. How can someone lose hope and find it to the weird places, how you shut down emotionally when someone you love is being forced to do the worst of tihngs, things that are no humanly imaginable and how you cope with these thoughts.

This is one great read with more adventure and pain that ever you ,will more than mesmerized by the talent of the author.

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino (book review by Eleni)

Author: Natsuo Kirino
Release Date: March 13th 2007 (1st published in 2003)
Publisher: Knopf
Pages: 480
Rating: 3 stars
Buy on: Amazon ,Barnes and Noble

Tokyo prostitutes Yuriko and Kazue have been brutally murdered, their deaths leaving a wake of unanswered questions about who they were, who their murderer is, and how their lives came to this end. As their stories unfurl in an ingeniously layered narrative, coolly mediated by Yuriko’s older sister, we are taken back to their time in a prestigious girls’ high school—where a strict social hierarchy decided their fates — and follow them through the years as they struggle against rigid societal conventions.

Shedding light on the most hidden precincts of Japanese society today,Grotesque is both a psychological investigation into the female psyche and a work of noir fiction that confirms Natsuo Kirino’s electrifying gifts.

Review:

This book confused me so much when it comes to the rating. It;s one of those books that belong in the in between and I really didn't know how to rate it. So I closed my eyes and gave it a 3. 

Like all Natsuo Kirino's books you get to see the story from multiple POV'S and I guess that's a good thing but not in Grotesque. At some point the narration becomes really boring while we get to know the background of Yuriko's murderer , and my opinion is that it was unnecessary for the author to do so in this book. I would like the book a lot better if it was based on two POV's instead of 3. It would me more mysterious and more fast paced and enjoyable rather than painful. Although , I wanted to commit suicide from boredom I couldn't put the book down because it was enjoyable from a whole different aspect...modern Japan.

While the main protagonist lives her life and tells the story of her sister Yuriko we get to see a Japan so much different than the cuteness and the happiness that we know. It's a Japan dark and grey where people judge from appearance and are nosy and above all they see mixed Japanese as ''bastards'' . You get to know the ''goods'' and bad's of prostitution and why people choose this kind of life. Kirino did a really good job with the writing in this one, although the translation had a lot of mistakes and at some points you couldn't make sense, blending fiction with reality in a book that was really intriguing and in the end sad. 

I didn;t enjoy this book as much I did with Out and Real World but I have to give it to her for her writing and the way she makes you see the real world people live in.