Attractions of the Heart by Cheri Crystal

Title: Attractions of the Heart
Author: Cheri Crystal
Publisher: loveyoudivine alterotica
Length: Novel / 281 pages
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Blurb:

Attractions of the Heart, a romantic collection of erotic short stories, begins with a hot date and ends with a commitment ceremony.

Whatever your tastes, Cheri Crystal offers an impressive FemErotic selection.

Review:

Here’s the thing: I think every book in existence has at least one reader out there in the dark somewhere, just waiting for that book to appear. Whether or not any given book finds its reader is a story unto itself.

But in this particular case, I think a book has gone astray.

Attractions of the Heart is a collection of eighteen short Cheri Crystal stories all about women involved in complicated pursuits of other women. A softball team captain secretly in love with the team femme. A park ranger who saves a stranded tourist from a mountain only to fall deeply in love. A pair of best friends, one who’s ready and one who’s not. A non-fishing femme in love with her butch angler coworker.

The stories are united by their happy endings: in every case, the girl gets her girl, in eye-poppingly explicit activities. Some stories, such as “Mile High Dare”, where two airline passengers hookup in the bathroom, simply end with the bang. In others, relationships form, coalesce or are transformed by the interactions, with promising results; in two of them, “Lobster Box” and “Climbing Rocks”, the protagonists joyfully relate how they’ve been with their partners now for several decades.

The characters involved run a varied gamut: butches, femmes, bois, doctors, nurses, authors, park rangers, anglers, businesswomen, authors of lesbian romance novels, you name it. And the settings are likewise varied, creating a well-managed collection that covers a lot of different angles of the contemporary lesbian experience in America.

So why did I only give the book one star? Several reasons.

First of all, the sex is not hot. The vast majority lapses into incredibly purple prose and I can only see the phrases “slickly glistening folds” and “wet depths” so often before my eyes go on auto-roll. In two of the stories, the main event even elicited a wince rather than a happy tingle.

In “Does the Butch Come with the Recipe?”, food play (which I’m usually a fan of) quickly lapses into squick. This is the softball teammates story, during which a spilled plate of nachos turns into a smorgasbord of kitchen and bedroom funtimes. But consider the following:

Soft moans amidst spicy salsa and smooth avocado was tasty, but Tristan was delectable. She pressed Tristan’s mouth more urgently. With their breasts squashed between wet clothes, her nipples became as hard as Tristan’s.
“Let me take this off.” Her words were like a faint breeze as she allowed Tristan to unbutton her shirt, revealing her naked flesh covered in remnants of Mexican dip.

I think nachos can likely be a sexy thing to get into (keep all jalapenos away from mucus membranes), but here it’s just not working, especially after having been described a few paragraphs earlier as “glop”. Mmm, glop.

From there, the protagonists both don aprons and enact some power plays with lemons, peaches, and a frozen banana. But there’s a consistent problem throughout the book with sentence-level construction and word choice–”She ate the glop off both their fingers,” “Tristan tugged on her shirt, obliterating further ruminating about past regrets”, “Will the best date ever lead to more than they ever dreamed of?”.

Take this passage from a few pages further on in the food play story:

The draft did nothing to quell her blazing, exposed areas that were already too hot to handle–even with oven mitts. Tristan’s gaze perused her body in a smoldering caress. Cyndy prepared to linger, but Tristan pulled a fast one and grasped her wrist. She was escorted to the rear of the home that led to the bath. A quick, cool rinse did nothing to diminish her fevered flesh.

For me, that writing is so clunky and difficult to follow–why would a rinse make someone’s flesh smaller?–that it completely catapults me out of the story. And there were passages like that in every story.

The other wince came from an unexpectedly brisk fisting, a situation I think we can all relate to.

I mean, I’ve seen some very, very well done scenes incorporating that activity. But unless there’s some highly non-standard anatomy going on, you can’t just have one character haul off and BAM! Flying fisticakes!

The collection also suffers from a consistent failure of logic. In the first story, “Lobster Box”, a dietician is set up on a blind date with a doctor, and takes pains to tell us the doctor is hot but could stand to lose thirty pounds and improve her nutritional habits. Three paragraphs later, said dietician has brought the doctor home and is feeding her hot chocolate and cookies. Physician, heal thyself.

Another example is in “Climbing Rocks”, which begins with the protagonist planning a trip to Sequoia National Park with her two friends. When her friends bail, she goes anyway, and, after being rescued off Moro Rock by a gorgeous park ranger, the two are forced to seek shelter in a hiking lean-to after the protagonist reveals she has no car. If this was explained at all–she bused close by and got a ride in, she hitchhiked, something–I could have ignored it, but not only was it not explained, but it’s used as the crux of the story, the whole reason the heroines are forced into close proximity. Um, what?

Third, there’s a complete drought of mentions or implementation of safe sex practice; the only one that comes to mind is when, inexplicably, a condom is thrown over the aforementioned frozen banana. I’m sorry, but you cannot have eighteen stories of contemporary hookups of any gendered combination, the majority of which involve first times, some between complete strangers, and not have sexual histories, test results, statuses or protection come up on a consistent basis. For me, it just added to my frustration with the stories.

Overall, the strength of this collection lies in its variety. Crystal’s put a lot of effort into creating situations and settings that try to speak to a breadth of women’s experiences and in that at least, she’s succeeded. At no point did I feel like she was writing the same characters over and over again (apart from the lesbian romance authors, which I suspect is something else entirely).

And I do suspect that there are readers out there who just want to see that type of variety depicted in their romance without overly concerning themselves with logic or style. After all, logic hardly plays a huge role in the average hookup.