A Good Student

A Good Student
Kindle Edition
Published August 25th 2008 by eXcessica

When passionate Professor Conner Devlin meets oversexed student Emma Fiore, the sparks ignite: he’ll train her to be his classroom sex slave, carrying out his every desire, while she gets to experience the forbidden pleasure of submissive love before her marriage to a dull and unfeeling man. But Emma’s sizzling and insatiable desires soon overwhelm Conner and he finds himself hopelessly in love with his young submissive. Emma accepts him as her sexual Master, but will she have him as her real-life lover?

Through the means of BDSM and the demands of extreme sex, Conner tries to break down the barriers between them and make Emma acknowledge her feelings, until one night things become too real and the games are forgotten. Conner takes Emma prisoner for real and their passions erupt in a cataclysm of raw emotion that rocks them both and fuses them in a transcendent love.

I pressed my face into her neck and crushed her to me like I wanted to kill her.

"Told with intense honesty from the dominant’s point of view, A Good Student gives a rare and searing look inside a man’s heart as he’s caught in the throes of a compelling and overwhelming love and passion, all his thoughts and feelings exposed. Listening to Conner’s confessions is like having your own personal Master tell you everything he feels, with a poet’s skill and a therapist’s insight. You’ll never look at the dynamics of D/s and a man’s sexuality the same way again."

My first erotic novel read written by a man, and a Dom to boot! The above review, tagged on to the end of the blurb on Goodreads, had me oh so intrigued. Drove me to snatch it up.

A Good Student is told through the first person POV of Conner, a poetry instructor who is filling in at the local community college. Or he is at the time of the story, for the book itself opens up as Conner only recollects this time of his life. He's actually a writer of romance- or pornography as he likes to tell it- where BDSM is the primary star of his fantasies and aggression.

When he slips up, quite purposely on a subconscious level, and reveals his pen name to Emma, he finds her all too eager to learn more of his writing. And the world from which he finds his inspiration.

Reading an erotic story written and viewed through the eyes of a male was altogether a new and rewarding experience for me. While vulgarity and degradation come and go, the tale remains a very sensual one. The use of different euphemisms and metaphors so unlike anything I've read from a woman does well in eliciting an entirely unique imagery in the world of BDSM.

I felt her shudder and twitch like a rag doll as she moaned and sobbed helplessly in my embrace. I held her so hard I felt tears squeeze out of my eyes and roll down my cheeks, catching me by surprise as she came and came and I thought through my joy how absolutely foolish I was. This was only sex after all.

This was only sex, to hold a woman's heart and soul in your hands and know she wanted you to do whatever you wanted to her and have her respond like this. This was only sex, when you touched each other in places no one else had ever touched and made you feel things beyond your ability to describe. Only sex where, for one brief instant, no matter how short and fleeting, the barriers fell away and you were somehow one with her—this stranger—and you weren't alone anymore.

It was only sex.

Only sex.

As the relationship evolves from Teacher/Student to Dom/sub and so forth, we're taken along for Conner's psychological evaluation of his feelings. How he interprets love, understands it, and becomes a victim of it. As emotions becomes more and more involved an inevitable loss of control occurs when Conner perceives Emma breaking from character. Outside of their fantasy, Emma has a soon to be fiance whose world she has become trapped in. When that world collides with the one Conner has so delicately crafted, his rage comes to surface and a darkness forces its way into their passion.

I found myself intrigued by Conner, wanting to learn from him and of him. His take on history and philosophy arouses curiosity and compels the reader to examine their inner selves. Emma, however, I remained at odds with. Our personalities clashed so wildly that the only empathy I could afford her was in the way of pity.

Sex is the abundant ingredient of this book. And I mean, there's a *lot* of it. So much so that it's not a book you can't put down, it's one you must put down in order to breathe again. It's oppressively graphic and, at times, perversely crude. And I've never been one for degradation in my erotica. 3.5 out of 5 stars. But I have to say, this is an amazingly well written book.