If ever there was an ideal spanking ambassador for the kink-curious mainstream, it’s Keenan: guileless, funny, sweet, generous, educated, white, cisgender and so quick to apologize for her 'bizarre obsession' that I found myself thinking: 'There’s nothing wrong with you! Some of us have the same obsession, and we don’t think it’s bizarre'...Without shying away from the lurid details of her erotic life, the promise of deeper revelation mostly simmers under the surface. Yet despite this withholding, what shines through is the story of a young woman looking to be made whole by love.
When she writes about Shakespeare and gets her hands dirty with his text, Keenan is at her most confident. Her prose soars with a clarity of vision and purpose. Writing about her own feelings, however, Keenan lapses into a kind of young girl’s breathlessness; she blushes, she stammers, she uses language that wouldn’t be out of place coming from Fifty Shades’ Anastasia Steele. You walk away from the book thinking that this is a super-nice, super-smart woman with a super-specific sexuality, and you might feel bad for her if it weren’t a love story and if she weren’t a skilled writer and thinker.
For all that this book can, and probably will be, broadly painted as about 'a woman with a spanking fetish,' there’s nothing so strange about a story of a woman coming to terms with her sexuality and her identity. Keenan’s excellent writing and humor make this a book enjoyable for fetishists and vanillas alike—especially if you like Shakespeare.
