“Smooth” Erotic Stories for Women Book Review
“Smooth” is an erotic anthology of stories that focus around the female body. The book is edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel and published by Cleis Press. It is available in a print, softcover edition or also available in a Kindle edition for less than ten dollars. The book is 204 pages long with 19 stories inside those 204 pages. The front of the book does show a semi-naked woman, so if you want to read this in public, you’d have to be careful about allowing people to see the cover.
As said before, the theme of this novel is the female body. All of the stories really revolve around the idea of the female body. This usually means that something is being done to a female. As such, most of the stories are told from the main female character point-of-view. Some of the stories are homosexual in nature, but the vast majority includes a male and female as the main sexual characters.
The neat thing about this collection is how varied it is. The plots are all very different. When it comes to having a nice, broad topic like the celebration of the female body, there are a lot of different ways that the authors could have taken it. It’s nice to see that Bussel brought all of these different stories that showcase female sexuality into one collection where I can easily ‘see’ the common theme between the stories. The stories, while amazingly different from one another, all really focus around this central theme.
The stories are a bit soft on the plot which can either be a good or bad thing depending upon your preferences. For the most part, the story gives the plot just to get the basic details out of the way but then dives straight into the sex aspect of the story. The sex isn’t described as specifically as I’d enjoy. Some of the sex scenes are really only mentioned in passing, and some of the scenes, while a focus of the story, are much more “discreet” than what I’d like out of my erotica. Yes, I’m a female, but I’d still like my sex to be laid out in a sexy, but not crass, manner. I feel like the book made everything a bit soft on the terminology in order to avoid turning some females off who have never picked up an erotica collection before.
When you think about everything that could celebrate the female body, I never could have come up with the list that the authors end up basing their stories around. There is public nudity, muscle building, piercings, using the female body as a canvas for paint, including food in sexual play, using ice cubes to play, erotic shaving of body hair, some kinky relationships, and tons more. The large variety of plots is really one of the best aspects of this book – I never knew what type of story was going to be next, but I did know it was going to be fun to read.
I enjoyed reading through “Smooth: Erotic stories for Women”. It is a sexy collection of stories that really make an interesting read. I wasn’t as aroused by this collection as I have been by other stories, but it didn’t stop it from being an interesting read that kept me glued to the pages. I wish the sex was described more explicitly, but this is still a good collection of erotica that will keep you wondering what the next story is about. Thank you to Cleis Press for sending me this copy for review, and you can pick up your own copy of Smooth: Erotic Stories for Women at their website.
