The Proposal

the book explores BDSM culture. submission is a distribution of power. I did not get a sense that the female lead was given enough power ,sum scenes portrayed her weak and mostly abused very disappointing it killed the eroticism at the end.

I don’t even know where to begin with how much I loved this book! It is told in different timelines, with different characters POV, but it flowed so smoothly. The story pieced together exactly as it should have, more of an abstract painting than a recreation of a scene. The story did what it wanted, went where it wanted, and explained itself as it needed, and we were left with a piece of art that I could totally immerse myself into. And holy goddesses was it hot, like take a few breaks from reading hot, and tuck away that scene for later hot. It was also smart, in a realistic, determined, turning my fantasy into reality while not fully understanding the consequences way. There were so many emotions in this book, I felt so many emotions while reading this book, and you really need to read to understand it all. Trust me, this love story, this proposal will dominate your thoughts afterwards as well!

You just have to take a risk on this one - I promise you, you won't be disappointed! The blurb is deliberately vague to allow what unfolds to surprise you, so this review will be somewhat vague on details! Beware some reviews are not so spoiler free. It took me a little while to totally get into the story, I'm not sure if it was me, or that it took a while to get to truly know the characters, or because the book hops around in time. (The latter is necessary to allow the story to unfold without spoilers and each chapter is clearly "timeline" labelled.) However that doesn't mean I wasn't loving this twisted and unusual tale. In part it was probably because I needed to get to know the characters, particularly Soren, in more depth before I could fall in love with them. I very enjoyed that this was written from multiple points of view, the story simply wouldn't have worked otherwise, you definitely need to hear each characters motivations and reasoning. I was fairly annoyed with Soren for quite a chunk of the story. He got so butt-hurt because Livia had the "gall" to date like a men do - keeping her options open and making no promises. She didn't sleep around, and she was honest with him. So his reaction to finding out was totally unreasonable. It wasn't until a scene from the last night of Livia's honeymoon that I actually had a total 180 on the guy and realised that he was, at heart, a really good man. Livia I liked from the start and I'm so glad she got her HEA. Whilst most of what I want to say would be spoilers, what I can say is that I was constantly surprised by this book, could never guess correctly what would happen next. Soren's friends Griffin and Dayne were much more likeable, most of the time, than he was, but I was still happy with how things played out. By the end of the story I was very confident that Livia's answer to Soren's question would have been "yes", but after all he had put her through, he definitely deserved the teasing non-answer she graced him with.