Review ~ Lustfully Ever After: Fairy Tale Erotic Romance

Stopping by from the Shameless Summer Giveaway Hop? Please visit Friday's post HERE for a chance to win free books!

Lustfully Ever After: Fairy Tale Erotic Romance by Kristina Wright
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My introduction to fairy tales written specifically for adults was Barbara G. Walker's Feminist Fairy Tales, which I read while in college and still adore 10+ years later. From that foundation, when I discovered Mitzi Szereto's In Sleeping Beauty's Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales in September 2009 - my introduction to Cleis Press titles - I was very pleasantly surprised. Szereto is the mistress of combining the cleverness of the classic fairy tale with fun, naughty adult sensibilities. Since then, I've continually been impressed with the quality of erotic short stories in Cleis Press' anthologies.

An especially talented editor of these anthologies is Kristina Wright. See, for example, Steamlust: Steampunk Erotic Romance and Dream Lover: Paranormal Tales of Erotic Romance. Since I really enjoyed 2010's Fairy Tale Lust: Erotic Fantasies for Women, I was sure I would find something enjoyable about 'Lustfully Ever After.' I was not disappointed.

The simple fact is, there is no bad story in this anthology. I have some favorites. Anna Meadows never writes an erotic short story in which I DON'T wish I were the heroine(s), so naturally, I loved "Matches." Emerald's "The Beast Within" was a magnificent beauty-and-beast tale, one sure to be a favorite of those who enjoyed Fifty Shades of Grey. Charlotte Stein's "You" is sublime and speaks directly to the witch in me. Evan Mora's "Real Boy," a transgender take on Pinocchio, has wonderful heart and soul, hot sex and a great message. Wright's contribution, "A Sea Change," is exactly the way The Awakening should have ended - less sink, more swim. Less shame, more joy.

I could go on and on, but if I were forced to choose a favorite under pain of torture, I would have to say "Steadfast" by Andrea Dale. Maybe it's just because I've got a little bit of a military fetish thing going on right now (me and Mr. James Jones - we got a thing going on), but DAMN. WOW. When I write in all caps like that, that means it was a hella powerful story, emotionally, sexually and psychologically. I tip my hat to you, Ms. Andrea Dale.

I just can't think of anything I didn't like about this book, which is why I have to give it five stars.

Disclosure: I received an uncorrected proof of this book from the publisher, unsolicited, at no cost. I was under no obligation to write this review, which represents my own honest opinion.


View all my reviews on Goodreads

Previous Cleis Press titles (fiction), reviewed on Pagan Spirits book blog:

Fairy Tale Lust
Dream Lover
Women in Lust
Steamlust: Steampunk Erotic Romance

Carnal Machines: Steampunk Erotica

Non-fiction Cleis Press titles:
Seal It With a Kiss
The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio
The Ultimate Guide to Cunnilingus

The Best of Blue Monday

Stopping by from the Shameless Summer Giveaway Hop? Please visit Friday's post HERE for a chance to win free books!

On Mondays I hook up with Pinning! at A Night Owl Blog/Baxtron{Life}. On Wednesday, it's Oh, How Pinteresting! at The Vintage Apple.  These are some of my favorites from past Blue Mondays. 

This is my very favorite from the celestial-themed Once in a Blue Moon post.



This one is from the jewel-themed Bejeweled Blitz post. 



Among the pretty pictures in the all-female pin-up post, the prettiest may have been this lady with the blue eyelashes.



The prettiest picture from Blue Man Group is of Christian Bale. 



Blue is really Christian Bale's color, even though he has hazel eyes. Since I posted Blue Man Group, I pinned this one, with the artfully disarrayed hair. The fun part is imagining how his hair got this way. Messed-up sex hair, maybe? 



This image comes from the Underwater theme.



The fourth Blue Monday theme was "Wear It." My personal favorite is the blue lipstick. The model's blue eyes really sell it. 

The Monumental post only featured two monuments: the Eiffel Tower lit up in blue lights, and this beautiful winter image from Chicago.

The first-ever Blue Monday was circus-themed. Sort of. It also only had two pins, the second of which is this colorful sequined costume.



Stop by on future Blue Mondays for more highlights from my Pinterest boards. My blog's very own board is Pagan Spirits Book Blog. Some of my other bookish boards are:

Nerdy Girls Need Love Too - tons of Harry Potter pins, plus various assorted nerderies

Hotties Read - George Clooney is the most popular reading hottie

Books Worth Reading

My Favorite Cole Porter Songs

Stopping by from the Shameless Summer Giveaway Hop? Please visit Friday's post HERE for a chance to win free books!

My historical American composer crush is George Gershwin. Still, I'm a native of the U.S. Midwest, so I have a certain Midwestern girl's affection for the composer Cole Porter. It's Porter's birthday; he was born June 9, 1891, in the small city of Peru, Indiana. This post was inspired by Cathy Day's post "For Cole Porter's Birthday, My Personal Playlist." Day is a novelist, an essayist, a professor at Indiana's Ball State University, and a Peru native. 

These are my personal favorite Cole Porter songs. I would not be much of a '90s girl if I didn't harbor a certain affection for the Bono/Frank Sinatra duet of "I've Got You Under My Skin." If I look hard enough, I'm sure I could still find the CD maxi single I bought when the duet came out. 

(As a matter of fact, I was such a big U2 fan, that song may have inspired a brief fascination with Frank Sinatra, which may have led me to want to read From Here to Eternity. Sinatra played Maggio, the buddy of Robert E. Lee "Prew" Prewitt.)

Nor would I be much of a '90s girl if I couldn't remember the version of "I Get a Kick Out of You" that Mel Torme recorded for a Mountain Dew commercial.

I'm not a fan of Mountain Dew, but then again, I'm not a fan of cocaine, either, which is what the real lyrics suggest might give a person a kick. Frank Sinatra sang "I Get a Kick Out of You" in the 1954 version of Anything Goes, which also starred Ethel Merman. It remains the one Cole Porter musical I've ever seen performed live on stage. 

If you've ever seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (probably the only major Hollywood film with several scenes devoted to the worship of Kali), you may remember Kate Capshaw's version of the title song in the Mandarin language. 

When I was a high school student, my local library had this book, featuring Ward Schumaker's artwork based on "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)." According to Goodreads, it was published in November 1993 (and the song is from 1928). I probably checked it out five times; I adored it.

A good pop version of "Let's Do It" is by Alanis Morissette. This is from the soundtrack of De-Lovely, with Kevin Kline and my most feminist girlcrush Ashley Judd. 

Another item I repeatedly checked out of my local library before I finally broke down and bought a copy (after another library patron lost the library's copy) was an album called Jazz Divas - Studio. It has two of the loveliest Cole Porter songs: Ella Fitzgerald's version of "Night and Day," and Shirley Horn's "Love For Sale." 

This arrangement is upbeat, but as I listen to this song, I can't help but think about Porter trying to express some of the angst of being gay in an era of strict sexual repression. 

"Love For Sale," on the other hand, can never be anything by melancholy, in a world-weary sort of way. Very Cole Porter. 

Those are the essential Cole Porter tunes for me. What are your favorites? 

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Win Free Books: The Shameless Summer Giveaway Hop Is Here!

Happy summer! Jen, Shelly and Allison at Red Hot Books have been kind enough to host this giveaway event.

The Prizes: One randomly-chosen grand prize winner will receive paperback copies of two Cleis Press titles: Going Down and Lustfully Ever After. The official blurbs:

Going Down
Oral Sex Stories

Edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel

Read My Lips

Get ready to go down!

Rachel Kramer Bussel, editor of the award-winning collectionsTasting Him and Tasting Her, is back with more lip-smacking oral sex erotica with Going Down. "There's no rush of power quite like it in the world," writes Mary Borsellino in "Blush," and that intimate and sensual rush comes to life in each of these twenty-one tales. The primal sense of taking in the true essence of a lover is a powerful aphrodisiac in Lucy Felthouse's "Clean/Dirty." Two lovers dine on oysters and each other in Dusty Horn's "Shuck It." An accidental porn-viewing session leads to sizzling live action in Jeanette Grey's "Seriously." Going Down celebrates every kind of oral sex in deliciously explicit stories that will make your mouth water. Get ready to fully savor every page.

With contributed stories by Charlotte Stein, Jacqueline Applebee, Cynthia Hamilton, Sylvia Lowry, Logan Zachary, Shanna Germain, Annabeth Leong, Jeremy Edwards, Jeanette Grey, Dusty Horn, Roxy Rogers, Mary Borsellino, Lucy Felthouse, Tenille Brown, Neil Gavriel, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Chrissie Michaelis, A.M. Hartnett, Elizabeth Coldwater, and Graydancer.

Lustfully Ever After
Fairy Tale Erotic Romance

Edited by Kristina Wright

Live Out Your Ultimate Romantic Fantasy!

Even grown-ups need bedtime stories, and this delightful collection of fairy tales will lead you down a magical path into forbidden romance and erotic love.

In Michelle Augello-Page's naughty "Wolf Moon," Little Red Riding Hood herself is the big, bad wolf, while Kristina Lloyd reimagines "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" with a scorching hot threesome in "The Last Dance." Shanna Germain's "Mirror Mirror" reveals the Sapphic side of Snow White's stepmother and Lisabet Sarai's Rapunzel captivates us with her wanton ways in "Shorn." As editor Kristina Wright notes in her introduction, "the authors of Lustfully Ever After know your heart's most wicked and secret desires."

With contributed stories by Anya Richards, Jeanette Grey, Anna Meadows, Emerald, Michelle Augello-Page, Shanna Germain, Kristina Lloyd, A.D.R. Forte, Donna George Storey, Charlotte Stein, Sacchi Green, Michael M. Jones, Lisabet Sarai, Evan Mora, Lynn Townsend, Andrea Dale, and Kristina Wright.

I'm reading Lustfully Ever After right now, and it is fabulous - especially after I just saw Snow White and the Huntsman on Tuesday.

Five randomly-chosen winners will receive an e-book copy of my latest release from Breathless Press: Ad-Dick-Tion Volume 2, a mostly M/M (some M/M/F - my contribution is) anthology.

The official blurb: In this collection of sizzling hot male obsessions, feel the heat with M/M erotic stories by our wonderful Breathless Press authors.

To Enter: Leave a comment on this blog post before midnight Eastern time on June 15. If you have a Google account and I can easily find your e-mail address by clicking on your name, that's all you have to do. If I can't get to your e-mail address easily to notify you if you won, please leave your e-mail address with your comment.

I'll choose the winner using Random.org. Be sure to visit the other bloggers and enter their giveaways - you could win multiple times!

WIP Wednesday with Arthur Levine

Authors needed - all genres! Are you an author who'd like to share a 100- to 200-word blurb about a current work in progress on a future WIP Wednesday? If so, please send an e-mail to Erin O'Riordan (erinoriordan AT sbcglobal DOT net). 


Erin O'Riordan: Over the weekend, Tit Elingtin and I edited the zombie survivor story, and I got it submitted. (Fingers crossed.)

Arthur Levine: My latest is now available on Kindle. Introducing my new novel Sequin Boy and Cindy:

Spirit ancestors charging through the night sky and a White Buffalo with blazing red eyes show our young lovers the way to true happiness. Two lonely young people from abused backgrounds find each other, fall in love, join the army, and both suffer injuries in a war in Iran, but go on to build a great miraculous future together. This is a heartwarming tale of the art of the possible as Billy and Cindy capture the hearts of an adoring public and take New York City by storm in this love story for the ages.

Previous Guest Posts by Arthur Levine
What You Should Know to Become a Writer
Are Your Hormones Out of Whack? Johnny's Are

The Transit of Venus 2012

The Transit of Venus is a rare astronomical event that occurs when the planet Venus crosses between the sun and the earth. The last Transit happened in 2004, and after June 5-6, 2012, the next one will be in December 2117. I'll be 140 years old then.

Transits of Venus can only occur in June and December, the solstice months. The Transit is not an eclipse; it does not block out the sun.

The 2004 Transit of Venus, photographed by Jan Herold.  Creative Commons

In a post related to the 2004 Transit, astrologer Susan Custer wrote that the Transit of June 1761 was one of the first events in world history - if not the first - over which scientists across the world worked together to share their observations. This caused the world (at least the science world) to have to think about global interconnectedness - astrologically appropriate, Custer maintains, because Venus is the planet of relationships.

I'm a Higher Power believer and a Goddess worshiper, and I also have a scientific mentality. I don't place any faith in astrology, but I am a folklore junkie, and there is no aspect of folklore I appreciate more than goddess lore. The rare Transit of Venus, then, seems like the perfect time to discuss she whom the ancient Romans called Venus.

William Adolphe Bouguereau, 1879; alterations by  Lieutenant Waaxe. Creative Commons. 

I said in the Bowl of Light review post that the Polynesians traditionally associate women with the West/sunset/death (but also healing) and the planet Venus. This resonated with the "If I Die Young" post, in which I wrote (based on sources I name there):

"The ancient Romans held the rose to be a symbol of Venus; its petals reminded them of a woman’s genitals. Venus the Rose-Goddess was Christianized as Saint Rosalia, the patron saint of Palermo. Like many European Pagans who associated the goddess of love with death, the Romans also considered roses a symbol of death. This association was not considered negative; rather, death was seen as a return to the goddess, the source of life. Being taken back by the goddess could lead to rebirth."


Venus, Kris Waldherr writes in The Book of Goddesses, "was born of sea foam and water and was described as 'the star of the sea' [Stella Maris in Latin] by her worshipers. As the goddess of love, she was 'the queen of pleasure;' she was also honored as the mother of the Roman people."

The title "Star of the Sea" explicitly links Venus with other goddess figures, including Mary the Mother of Jesus. The Roman emperors especially liked to claim symbolic descent from Venus, similar to the Japanese imperial family's claim (held right up to the 20th century) to be descended from sun-goddess Amaterasu. A major Italian city, Venice, is still named after her.

In Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio - wrongly believing that his intended bride, Hero, has cheated on him - tells Hero:

"You seem to me as Dian in her orb,

As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown.

But you are more intemperate in your blood

Than Venus..."

...and means the goddess' name as an insult, a synonym for slut. Claudio expects a virgin bride, like Diana, the virgin moon goddess.

According to The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker, for centuries, Venice's duke would mark the Christian feast day of the Assumption of Mary (August 15, still a public holiday in Italy) by casting a golden ring into the sea. This was a holdout from ancient times, when Roman rulers would symbolically marry Venus once a year.

Note once again that ancients didn't really have a problem conflating "mother" and "wife." Nor did the supposed dichotomy between Jesus' virgin mother and the sexually adventurous Venus give them much pause. They still understood that women, goddesses and the moon all had phases.

Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1614. "The Death of Adonis." Public domain.

In Classical Roman myth, Venus had many consorts and lovers. Her version of the Annually Dying and Returning Vegetation God is Adonis, a beautiful young hunter who is annually slain, and then Venus and Persephone argue over who gets to keep him. Where the drops of his blood touch the earth, red anemones bloom.




I wrote in "Blood Sugar Sex Magik:"

" [A witch friend of mine said,] 'One of the classic ways of sexual magic is to invoke Venus, and should you wish more information on this subject, I suggest you summon her and beseech her for an interview. But beware of her price.' That price sounded rather ominous, so I chose not to invoke the wrath of the goddess by disturbing her."

Why was I afraid of Venus? I'm not afraid of her anymore. Whatever her price is, I'll pay it. She already holds my heart in the palm of her hands anyway.

Besides Venice, Venus also gave her name to Venus observa, the Latin term for the missionary position. It's used mainly in church documents. (It would make a cool band name, if it's not already taken.)

Venus at GoddessGift.com: http://www.goddessgift.com/goddess-myths/roman_goddess_venus.html

Blue Monday ~ Blue and Nerdy

These pins come from my Nerdy Girls Need Love Too board on Pinterest. On Mondays I hook up with Pinning! at A Night Owl Blog/Baxtron{Life}. On Wednesday, it's Oh, How Pinteresting! at The Vintage Apple.

And by "sometimes," I mean always.



And when I say "always," I mean



(Saw it in the theater twice, cried my eyes out both times. Yes, even the second time, even when I knew exactly when it was coming.) 

When you love to read in general and you're a complete Harry Potter nerd in particular:



I don't know what the other reasons are, but this one's good enough for me.



Dis bitch!! I'm a big Helena Bonham Carter fan, but come on, there's no way to like Bellatrix LeStrange. She's distilled essence of bitch. She makes Effie Trinket seem decent.  

I'm so glad I haven't seen any of the Hunger Games movies yet. Now that I've finished reading Mockingjay, I've kinda got a little bit of Suzanne Collins withdrawal. At least I still have four movies to look forward to. 



Why Batman? Some of it is because I'm a teeny bit of a comic book geek. Some of it is my unending celebrity crush on Christian Bale. No matter what Harrison Cheung writes about him in Christian Bale: The Inside Story of the Darkest Batman. Gotta admit it, though: Bane is by far NOT my favorite Batman villain. 

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