Book review: Kiss Between My Lines by Anne Tourney

Kiss Between My Lines by Anne Tourney

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
Links: Amazon • TBD • Goodreads
Publication Date: August 7, 2008
Source: This was a gift from my amazing boyfriend, who knows that I love hate-reading erotica. ❤

Infogeek Jordi can’t break her addiction to her loaded laptop, her favorite source of secondhand stimulation. But when her laptop is stolen she’s forced to get her fix at the library’s computer terminals, and there she stumbles across a blog recounting the sexual adventures of a sultry love-addict called Dana. Jordi’s and Dana’s identity begin to mesh in bizarre ways and Jordi finds herself falling for Nolan, the insanely hot, renegade library page who’s trying to help her figure out how she’s connected to Dana. She’s also drawn into a series of intense mind games with Steffan, an elusive older man who works at the reference desk and leads a secret life of his own. Meanwhile, Dana’s adventures are growing wilder by the day, and Jordi can’t stop slipping in to Dana’s world to sample its stolen delights. Soon Jordi is way too busy to question her borrowed identity . . . until Dana steps up to reclaim it. Will Jordi be able to go back to the realities of flesh-life – and the possibility of true love – after spending time in Dana’s sexy virtual skin?

To say that I was excited to read a book like Kiss Between My Lines would be an understatement. I love a good hate-read (just see my reviews for Troll, Distrust, Axl, and Burn the Fairy Tales) and this sounded like just the book for me. And, you know what? It was an experience. I honestly have no idea what I just read.

I guess, first of all, I’d say that the synopsis is really misleading. Yes, the book is about a sex addict named Dana and an infogeek named Jordi. Sure, Jordi stumbles across Dana’s blog and is really intrigued by it. But the whole “soon Jordi is way too busy to question her borrowed identity “and “Dana steps up to reclaim it” thing? Did I miss that? Also, her laptop is never stolen, it just breaks? I’m so confused.

This is a huge spoiler about the whole “borrowed identity” thing.

The only thing I can think of that makes that part of the synopsis make sense is the “plot twist” at the end of the book, which honestly, I saw coming from about chapter two. The thing is, Jordi and Dana have very similar physical appearances. (They’re both redheads and both overweight.) Jordi looks for Dana but can never find her. At the end, there’s this weird Fight Club-style reveal that Jordi and Dana are actually the same person, Jordana. (I rolled my eyes.) But even with that reveal, I can’t say that the synopsis makes a ton of sense. It’s not like Jordi and Dana fight or anything. I also didn’t understand how Jordi can have an apartment that she shares with a roommate while Dana is homeless and sleeping in a library after being kicked out by her father. The ending was such a mess and really cemented my one-star rating.

Moving on to something else that didn’t really make sense to me: LIRA. Now, I get the concept. In case you want me to save you from the 256 pages of this book, I’ll give you a brief description of Jordi’s pride and joy. LIRA is a computer program that somehow mentally connects all of its users. They can pass emotions through LIRA’s network and mostly use it to “Throb” and “Thread,” which I guess is supposed to be like sex? Its users have physical reactions to both using it and not using it, and at one point, Jordi steps away from her laptop and experiences actual withdrawal symptoms. An interesting concept, for sure, but how exactly this computer program is able to effect its users so strongly is never explained. Whenever LIRA was brought up in the book, I got kind of distracted because I started thinking about how something like that would actually work.

The next thing I want to talk about is the safety aspect. I don’t want to give more spoilers than I already have, but I think I can say that, in her search for her next sexual conquest, Dana does some really dumb things. She seems to have no concept of personal safety (like, for example, stranger danger) until she suddenly does. And every time she would suddenly act like a normal human being and think to herself, “hmm, maybe I shouldn’t put my life in danger right now,” she’d be like, “nah, he’s cute” and keep doing whatever she was doing. Maybe that’s another aspect of her sex addiction, that she’s just so focused on her next sexual experience that she doesn’t even think about anything else, but it kind of irritated me.

Anyway. Overall, the writing actually wasn’t that bad. I feel like the author could write a good book if she wanted to, and I wondered a few times if she was just messing with us with this book. I mean, it’s just so ridiculous that I almost think it has to be on purpose. The only thing I found odd about the writing style was that Jordi’s chapters were written in third person and Dana’s were written in first person. I guess I get it since Dana’s chapters are her blog posts, but it was still an adjustment every time the POV changed.

All in all, the book was easy to read, but a definite mess. I’m not sure what exactly the author was going for here, since Dana’s chapters were pretty classically erotic while Jordi’s chapters were… not. I can’t really recommend this one unless you’re looking for a particular kind of crazy story, but I sure had fun reading this.

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#romanceopoly: erotic eaves

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Have you read Kiss Between My Lines? Do you have any idea what I just read? Let’s talk in the comments!

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