Book Review: Axe Marks the Spot, Kayla Grosse
Smart, sexy, well-researched, and appropriately steamy! Kayla Grosse does it again.
A huge thanks to NetGalley and Forever (Grand Central Publishing) | Forever for sharing an advanced readers copy with me in exchange for my honest thoughts.
Are you looking for a healthy, hot, and quick read? Curious about other sexual lifestyles and open to learn? Hot for rugged lumberjacks in a way that will have you devouring this book in one sitting? Then this interconnected romance series is for you!
🚦The perfect intro to Sub/Dom culture
I read Kayla Grosse’s first book in the Lumbersnacks series, and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the proper education and acceptance I received about polyamory while reading it. And now, with this book, further reading about D/s culture, brat tendencies, and the world of sexual fantasies, I was again so in love with the way that Grosse educates her readers while entertaining them. She takes you along on a journey with characters that are also new to this world and teaches you what it means to be D/s in a healthy way.
💞 Healthy relationships FTW
One of my favorite things about the way that she does her stories is that they are all entirely healthy—healthy presentation of desires, healthy ways of handling consent, and all around mentally healthy, well-adjusted people. Sure, our FMC has her problems, her things she’s working through, we’re human here! But conversations happen, nothing is toxic, and an often “dark romance” sort of trope is handled in a pleasant acceptable way.
🪓 My favorite quotes just to make you read them:
- “Dane’s control doesn’t strip me down; it builds me up. It doesn’t silence me; it grounds me. What we’re doing isn’t just exciting or fun; it’s changing me. I feel more confident every day, more capable.”
- “Lesson number one: Brats don’t get what they want.”
- “Look at me me Lindsey.”
My head snapped up, and my brown eyes meets his beautiful hazel ones.
“Now that we can see each other, keep your eyes on me unless I tell you otherwise,” he says sternly.
“Yes, Sir.”
- “I am loved, I am beautiful, I am enough.”
- “On your hands and knees, baby. Then follow me like the good girl I know you are.”
- “There’s a sentence about not liking her body, which makes me angry. Her body is perfect, and I’ll make it a mission of mind to help her love it, to help her love and accept all parts of her.”
In conclusion…
I loved the introduction to a healthy Dom/Sub relationship. Furthermore, the amazing care taken to describing the life of a single mom and overworked health care worker being supported in her self-improvement journey by a burly Dom sending her check-in texts and perpetuating positive self talk was written so well and created the sexiest relationship I’ve seen in a book in a long time!
