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While Bound by Love was the first ebook I’ve ever read, it wasn’t my first piece of erotica—and thank God for small favors. If Bound by Love had been my introduction to erotica, I think I never would have read anything more potent than Little House on the Prairie ever again. Erotica is like a trashy romance novel that goes to 11, and therefore it’s not for the faint of heart or the prudish. But Bound by Love is simply out of control—and not in a good way. It’s misogynistic, vulgar, and offensive. In other words, this book is filth, pure and simple.
The so-called heroine of the book is Adrianna, a young single woman in present-day New York City. She’s kidnapped and knocked unconscious, and she wakes up to find herself naked and shackled to a bed in some remote castle. She’s quickly told that she’s become the sex slave—yes, you read that correctly—of one Lord Kaden. She was given as a gift—again, you read that right—to Kaden as a reward for his great sacrifice made in deference to Lord Damien, the Overlord of his planet.
Kaden and Adrianna wind up falling in love—even though he’s been confined to a mirror (Kaden found himself on the wrong end of a witch’s curse) and she rails against the concept that she’s “owned” by another person. Adrianna tries to escape a couple of times, and there’s a subplot involving a witch and an attempted coup.
All in all, the plot is pretty thin. Stone is never too keen on the details, which makes me think of this book as a literary version of your typical porno movie: when all you care about is the sex, do you really need a cohesive plot and good character development? I say resoundingly: yes. So it bothered me that we never learn Adrianna’s last name nor the name of the planet she’s transported to—or even how she gets there. The reader is expected to suspend disbelief an awful lot. And though I normally wouldn’t mind, it’s missing the well-developed set of characters and plot needed to back it up. As a reader, I’m not going to excuse a thin plot if I don’t find myself emotionally involved with the characters. I hated Kaden for his callous views of emancipation and slavery. I hated Adrianna for not fighting back more, and I hated her for falling in love with her captor. It’s like some bizarre form of the Stockholm Syndrome. I hated Lord Damien, too. Basically, I didn’t like one single character in the whole book. That’s a first for me!
Without some sort of emotional attachment to the characters, the sex scenes all become hollow. And this book is just one gratuitous sex scene after another—something I sort of expected, considering it’s erotica. But I didn’t expect to get so bored with it. Usually, I find myself skipping ahead to the “good parts,” if I don’t like a book’s plot. But, in this case, I began to skip over the sex scenes. They’re just too vulgar and too gratuitous, and they become too repetitive. I realized halfway through that Markham would simply change the names in each scene, keeping everything else intact. And the sex wasn’t romantic at all. In fact, it was just the opposite. I’ve always figured that one person’s “kinky” is another person’s “normal,” but Stone goes too far. I can’t think of a single decent human being who would find scenes of rape and incest sexy…or romantic…or erotic—ever. While a little light bondage play might be sexy now and again, several scenes in Bound by Love simply turned my stomach. There were times when I was tempted to stop reading—but, knowing that I had a review to write, I plugged onward to the bitter end. And I can’t honestly say that I’m glad I did.
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