Sure, I'll let you in. If you're smashing!

Today on the chopping block is a new guy in my social circle/book club, named . Through a truly tragic string of luck, coincidence, and divine providence (really me just saying 'screw it ill take him' when his assigned partner needed to take exams) he was given my lovely self to be paired with. All according to plan.

Unfortunately I may have overplayed my scheme as he cleverly foresaw long ago, before ever meeting me, that his day would come and initiated a plot. He put to pen a story that which would be my weakness and downfull. My Kryptonite! The source of my greatest agony! A torture for which my eyes were not meant to uphold!

Erotica!

How clever... How did he know I was autistic? How did he know I get about as much out of such things as a snail taken to mayonaise?

TLDR; The book is actually a trilogy of 2-3 chapter books that are half-romantic and half-erotic. Explicity so, so far as I can tell at a glance.

Extra: My first thought going into this was 'why the hell didn't you just make it one story?' Each one is short. The second and third carry on minutes after their previous book. They have a shared plot and shared characters. It feels like a lot of extra work to split it into such bite size pieces. Its not something I see 'technically' as bad, but it is really weird to me. Like going to the store three seperate times for three seperate things you could have just bought all at once the first time. If you wanna take the time to do that, by all means. It has no bearing positively or negatively.

I will be treating it, for the sake of this review, as one book.

Main Character: Feels out of place - The story centers around a woman. At first you know little about her that is useful, but through the use of first-person perspectives you get character and impressions, both mentally and visually of what is around her. She reflects a lot, which is nice. At first the character is very weak. A lot of time and paragraphs are wasted on things that leave me wondering why it matters at all, which I will bring up in the world building. As a character she is interesting, engaging, proactive, normal enough to relate to easily, but has two flaws: She lacks agency as she never really makes choices but is victim to outside influence and the Side Characters. Secondly, she seemingly has no plot. Its fair enough that she has ambition and desires and dreams, but the plot SUDDENLY takes an exit on high-way 71 and goes off in some new random direction where none of her ambition, desires, or dreams, have any purpose or merit. Then the story is very much about telling us how she feels, rather than showing it. At least outside of the immediate erotic areas (as I skipped those paragraphs). Overtime, though, I will acknowledge that there is strong progress. The story is very short, and everything I have described thus far is just the first chapter alone. The second non-erotic chapter is very good, and gives us a lot more about her, which I loved and felt like it belonged as her introduction more. My first impression would have been much better if the second chapter is where we started. There is some mystery, which was nice, and it wasn't immediately divulged via telling, but was still presented in an obvious enough of a way that we can follow her train of thought and reach the same conclusion easily. Then the third non-erotic segment, now in the third book, felt... very weird and out of place. It returned to telling us how she felt rather than showing us, and her reactions to the conclusion of the mystery felt... shallow. I dont know. There is potential in her, and if the same characterization done in the second part could be done more, then it would help.

Side Characters: Overbearing - The side characters aren't inheritantly bad. Nor would I qualify them as good. There is so little shown about them that it is impossible to really consider them actually as characters. I know as much about them towards the end as I did towards the beginning, outside of seeing one painting of them in a particular setting. Then the moment they appear the whole story just flips on its head, multiple times, and goes down directions that have no bearing on the characterization already done. They are powerful, take away all power and agency and character from the MC, and leave the MC as a shallow fragment of who she could be as a character, while they themselves offer almost nothing outside of sex.

Grammar and Word Usage: Rapid improvements - One thing I noted is that the grammar and usage of words improved rapidly from one short book to the next. The first part was unedited. And by unedited, i mean UNEDITED. The second part also looks unedited, but substantially better. The third part reads well. This is rapid growth and kudos for that. Still, I think it would be good to stick the whole story in Grammarly and just knock out practically everything the free website gives you. Because many issues I found were basic.

World Building: Unnecessary and told - Nice as it is to have a character that is contemplative, insightful, and does a lot of thinking and reflecting, we also need to recognize that this is a short story to which a large portion of the beginning is used... on world building. World Building that offers seemingly nothing. I spent a lot of the beginning wondering what the point of a paragraph is, what it offers to the story, and what its purpose is. It is nice for a girl to think of how she likes nature and how the environment outside of her home looks, but what does it have to do with a very short story about the relationship dynamics of three characters? It is simply not used efficently. We get told she has a cat. Great. Cute. But the cat is never mentioned or involved past the one brief sentence it exists in and it offers nothing. Every detail is told, rather than having taken the time to be shown, and the details that are told have little involvement to the plot. Its cluttered, its disorganized, it has little to offer, and what is offered is never utilized, and most of all, the worst of all, it takes up important word-space on getting to know the world around the character that would be better off used getting to know the characters themselves.

Plot: Everyone combines into a mess - Between a World Building that takes away valuable space from a character for us to get to know and Side Characters that take away her agency and turn her more or less into a mindless shadow of a character, we are left with a MC you cannot engage with, pretty much on any level. The Side characters themselves, as mentioned, are shallow as their scenes are so brief. There is never a point, outside of one area in book 2, where I could latch onto any character. Never a moment of 'humanity'. There is hinted at moments where they chill and engage and do stuff, but it is rushed over and told that it happened after the fact, rather than portrayed and shown and used as actual scenes in a story about people. Most events are told rather than shown. All of this combines into a plot that is seemingly just an excuse to have sex. There is a hint of mystery, which was nice, and this mystery, to the story's credit, was shown rather than told. I loved how the MC was intelligent enough to see a painting and put pieces together in her mind. Her thoughts flow very well and are easy to follow. And when you put the pieces of plot together, it is actually interesting. But it is impossible to get engaged with or have personal investment into when everything else about the story is trying to sabatage it.

Overall I would rate it 2 smashing out of 5. The plot is interesting. The way the mystery was shown was well done. The problem that really destroys the story to me is how the limited amount of word-space is used between the MC, SCs, and world building. The grammar is subpar, but I am not counting that against the story because it improves so rapidly. I want to give credit where credit is due not just for where the story started but where it went.

(Still stick it in Grammarly and see what it points out. It should be much easier to read after a brief editing.)

I see potential for the story to be 3 smashing out of 5 if the word-space is utilized better so the characters are engaging and emotionally relatable.

I'm out with a smashing!!

If you are interested in learning to write, mastering the craft, want some really good reads, or just to chat and hang out with a mature group of adults, feel free to hit me up for a smashing discord book club that has lasted years.