A romance … sort of …?
Jane Boon’s “Edge Play” is an interesting book that settles into a space just on the borders of romance. Set against the backdrop of the 2008-2009 financial meltdown, it’s the story of Amy, a Wall Street banker who loses her job in the wake of the collapse of a series of bad deals and falls into a new, if brief, career as a dominatrix under the tutelage of a college friend. It’s a story of balancing risks and desires, of reading the markets in both finance and fetish, and of identifying and exercising power.
About halfway through the book, it feels like we’re falling into some pretty standard romance tropes. While Amy’s mentor is away in Switzerland, she takes over a collection of male clients with various kinks requiring her to belittle, berate, and beat them in a secret dungeon below a Manhattan art gallery. One of the clients has a need to be bound in the dark, and over the course of her sessions with him, Amy uncovers his back story and starts an ill-advised whirlwind romance. This feels like the relationship that will lead us to our happily-ever-after, and it kind of is, but certainly not in the way the reader expects.
As a new and largely untutored reader of romance, I wasn’t bothered by the subversion of the tropes that occurs; I found it fascinating. The characters are delightful, the demimonde of dungeons is treated with sensitivity and care, and the sexy scenes are, indeed, sexy. That the ending isn’t in keeping, exactly, with romance expectations is a little surprising, but not a problem for me. A more demanding reader of romance may be more bothered that “Edge Play” veers off the expected path.
(To be fair, “Edge Play” isn’t always placed in romance per se — my library puts it in “Erotic Fiction” — but I stumbled on it in a list of romance-adjacent books worth a read; and it’s certainly that!)
