Remember the old saying that "Thin is in but fat is where it's at"? Reactive to our current thin-obsessed culture, there's a whole crop of pendulum-swing books that ascribe to that persuasion. In The Invisible Woman, W. Charisse Goodman says of the treatment a fat woman gets in contemporary culture, "No matter how well-loved or loving she may be, she constantly gets the message that she is hiding from intimate relationships behind her full flesh." I don't know if Beverly Havlir read The Invisible Woman, but whether or not she did, she comes to her defense in Jed's Revenge. And the last thing her strong women are doing is hiding from intimacy.

It just so happens that Kate, the reluctant heroine of Jed's Revenge is not one of these bone thin American cover girl wannabes, but rather a chubby curvy female with somewhat low (weight related) self-esteem. Kate and her sister have the distinction of being half Pagan--not pagan as in witches, but their mother escaped from a harsh planet called "Pagan." After their mother's death, the girls pilgrimage to her home planet to recover a family artifact; and they get captured by her mother's people. Circumstances dictate that Kate lose her virginity rather than become the virgin plaything of a sadistic Pagan madman. The unwilling tool of her deflowering happens to be a bound Pagan captive, a victim of Pagan torture, a Karn’alian Cyborg--Pagans' mortal enemy. And from the moment of their union--with him lying bound and her as the involuntary dominant, he swears revenge.

On a not uncommon D/s note, this book plays on the irony of unwillingness, where sexual arousal overpowers the rational. Jed is not a muscle bound stick figure, and Kate is not a wax Barbie doll; their characters are both developed enough that there could have been more story than just the bare bones erotic one. I did wonder at all of the fascinating scenes which were omitted: exactly how Jed managed to escape and what happened in his life--in addition to his recovery from Pagan torture--and how, years later, he managed to track down his reubenesque Kate. And for that matter, I also wondered how Kate and her sister managed to escape their Pagan captors and get back to earth unscathed. I expect there will be a predictable sequel with Prince Rohm and Kate's sister Erin.

The scenes that make up Jed's Revenge are the precise explicit scenes which would have ended on the cutting room floor of old sci-fi novels that talked about everything but descriptive sex. Still, this is a quick hot read appropriate to its designated genre and will be of particular interest to those who appreciate zaftig heroines, super-macho males and the chemistry of D/s.

Reviewed By Maitresse
© January 2006