Sometimes the perfect Chanukah gift can change everything.
Newly divorced stone butch Jordan moves into her friend Leah’s spare room, ready, at 49, to take on a new job and finally explore kink and polyamory. But moving to NYC during the holidays sends grief crashing through her, and Jordan realizes that when she isn’t solely focused on caring for others, her own feelings are unavoidable. Including her feelings for Leah.
51 year old queer femme Leah, an experienced submissive kink educator who owns a sex shop, has recently come to terms with being gray ace and is trying to rework her life and relationships to honor that.
Leah has a brainstorm to help them both: she offers Jordan eight kink lessons, one for each night of Chanukah, to help Jordan find her feet as a novice dominant, and to create a structured space where Leah can work on more deeply honoring her own consent, now that she knows she’s gray ace.
She’d planned to keep it casual, but instead the experience opens cracks in the armor Leah’s been using to keep people at a distance and keep herself safe. Now she needs to grapple with the trauma that’s been impacting her life for years.
Can these two autistic queers find ways to cope with the changes they are making in their lives and support each other, as they build something new they hadn’t thought was possible?
This kinky polyamorous Chanukah f/f romance includes a friends to lovers, roommates to lovers, kink lessons, seasoned romance and getting your groove back tropes, and polyamorous, gray ace, pansexual, Jewish, fat, autistic, disabled, arthritis, PTSD and depression representation.
The representation in this book is pretty impeccable. It's definitely the redeeming factor in this book. Along with the fully annotated content list. Not just a thorough content warning, but it gives chapter headers for where you can find the content you're look for or trying to stay away from.
There are a lot of pop culture references and allusions in this book. It is very clear that the author has a lot of love and respect for music and movies and books, etc. I love a good allusion. But there's allusion, and then there's just....including lyrics from multiple songs in your book. And they're definitely credited and sourced, they were used respectfully. But... they were over-used in my opinion.
I think the biggest thing for me with this book, is that my expectations were too high for a fun kinky romp through the eight nights of Chanukah. This was definitely a kinky journey during Chanukah. But I certainly wouldn't use the words fun or romp. This book is heavy. These characters that have so much love for one another are holding all of their trauma and insecurities. Their grief and their fears.
It's a lovely story. Leah and Jordan are wonderful main characters. Their friendship is really beautiful. But again, I wanted light hearted kink and that is just not what this book is. I can appreciate what this book is, and I wanted to meet it where it was at. The representation of therapy was beautiful. The communication was beautiful. But ultimately, it just wasn't what I wanted.
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