Partners: Love is a Law Unto Itself (Harrison Young, Jane Curry)

These stories detail adventures in sex and romance at a top law firm in New York. Each story focusses on a different character, such as a partner or litigator in the firm, but follows a similar pattern. We learn a bit about the character’s background, they take a surprising erotic step (such as taking off their clothes in public, or doing something with scrambled eggs) and then they fall in love or learn a lesson about what they want. There are minimal sensual details about their encounters, so the book is not erotica, but neither is there a satisfying slow build to the characters’ unions. The stories overall lack depth and detail, and due to the amount of dialogue, they read like gossip about characters with whom we’ve built no rapport—the author prefers to tell us about them rather than having us judge them through their actions: ‘They were both self-conscious. They were both lonely.’ The stories are also conservative. Though some highly successful men and women may be secretly lonely and waiting for love, it seems unimaginative to paint every character with the same brush. The portraits of ambitious women who secretly desire submission border on offensive. The author may know a lot about the inner echelons of high-profile environments, but the audience for these stories is potentially small.

Angela Meyer is a writer, reviewer and former acting editor of Books+Publishing 

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Category: Reviews