Skylar's Guardians

Skylar's Guardians
by Breanna Hayse
Rating: 3 of 5 stars

My Review:
Seriously, who doesn't enjoy some hot alien sex with guys who are huge and specially endowed? There's something fun about reading books like this and I had a good time with some of it. I even stayed up a little late to finish it up. The writing style was okay; sometimes a bit weird as the author mentioned herself multiple times. I found the names hard to keep straight. Both alien men are T names and I got them confused all the time. Sometimes you have no idea which person is talking, but if you sort of merge both aliens together like they're conjoined twins, it all works out fine. There were a couple alien women with L names and I didn't even try to keep them straight. The names threw me for a loop, but didn't interfere with parts of the book I enjoyed.

But... (and it's a big one) there was a lot of spanking in this book. And by a lot, I mean bruises and welts on an almost daily basis. There was also a number of anal punishments. I'm not into pain, so I found those parts of the book over the top and distasteful.

Any sex these characters have is completely consensual, which I thought was good and somewhat strange considering all the pain and punishment. The spanking and everything was kept almost completely separate from the sex. Anytime sexual contact happened, Skylar was the instigator or a completely happy participant and there was no punishment related to her sexuality. There was age-play, humiliation, spankings, punishment, forced nudity, etc. that happened separate from the sex, but none of those kinks were obviously enjoyable to Skylar. There were a couple mentions that she “secretly” liked them, but I felt they were so separate from sexual gratification, the story veered too far into the bad sadism for my taste.

As much as the pain disturbed me, even more gag-inducing was the motivation behind the punishments. Maybe it's a universally acknowledged feature of BDSM/spankings, but from the outside these guys were reenacting a certain fundamentalist child training manual that is well known to be abusive. And Skylar's reactions to her “training” were exactly what this manual says you should expect. Having been around that style of training often enough while growing up - no, just no.

This woman was saved by the aliens after having been repeatedly raped and beaten by her ex boyfriend/drug dealer. She is given no choice in any of her actions; from what she wears, to what she eats, to how she can spend her day. Any deviation is met with more beatings and punishments. And yet eventually she comes to see that they really have her best interests at heart and she'll do a better job trying to be a good, responsible, compliant person.

It could have been just a fun, zany book, but when it veered so far into pain and non-consensual “training”, I felt dirty, soiled, and really squicked out by the time I finished it. It might be your cup of tea, but it wasn't mine.