This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by ReneeG. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Erotic Romance category.

Here is ReneeG.'s review:

The Saint is in the middle of Reisz’s series, Original Sinners, and is billed as the prequel.  I haven’t read the books before this one, so I read this as a newbie to the series, and as an amateur to the themes in the book.  As an introduction to her world, it was frustrating at times to only get the surface of the story or miss the nuances of a picture.  But it was doable, although I definitely will reread this book if I get this far in the series, just so I can get the backstory of the little vignettes that teased at something below the surface.

So, about the book.  This is the story of how Elle/Eleanor/Nora met and loved Søren/Father Stearns and met Kingsley/the King.  The book not only shares the beginning of the triad but also the shift in the relationships, as Reisz uses Nora (the adult) to tell her complicated history to Kingsley’s son, Nico, as a Grimm-style fairy tale.  The flashback story worked much better for me than the current lovefest in the cottage with Nico – it seemed more real, until it didn’t.

So this is a story of new love.  It is the story of choice – of choices taken and abandoned, and of living with the choices you select.  It is, most importantly, the story of domination, sadism and submission.  It is also, nominally, an erotic story, although there is very little sex in the story of Elle and Søren.

The device used for the book, that of older Nora telling much-younger Nico (which, excellent!) of how her teenage self (Elle) stepped into the world of the Underground by falling in love with a priest.  The chapters are prefaced by the name of the narrator, either Nora (the adult and experienced woman) or Eleanor, the name Søren calls her as a teenager but not the name she self-identifies with (Elle), but it quickly became apparent who was talking (or not talking – Nora and Nico have a lot of sex in their few chapters).

Taken as a whole, this device worked well, especially in the beginning as we meet Nora who has arrived at a cottage in Germany’s Black Forest to fulfill a self-imposed duty. Towards the middle, Nora’s story turned from her feelings about her duty to various sexual positions with Nico.  Perhaps this was to show the juxtaposition of the accomplished woman to the virginal girl (although, as Elle mentions, never an innocent), but I wanted to push Nora out of the way while I discovered more about Elle, who is very interesting and intelligently snarky for a teenager.  It was Elle’s growth that caught and held my interest for the majority of the book.

For a book describing the love affair between a priest and a girl who is two weeks shy of 16 when they first meet, the tone is not salacious or prurient.  Elle is up front about wanting to sleep with Søren and damn the consequences.  He is the one who brings up the roadblocks – she is 16, he is a priest, he is a sexual sadist (he brings this up right away and repeats it throughout the book), she is 16, you get the picture.  Søren also bottom-lines it for her – the women that he plays with are adults, they have life experience and fully understand what they are getting into with him.  We see snippets of Søren’s backstory of how he developed into the man he became and how much being a Jesuit priest means to him as we delve into Elle’s story.  Every one of Elle’s decisions has consequences and watching/reading how she grows from these choices is fascinating.

Each consequence brings Elle closer to a fuller understanding of what being with Søren will mean to her.  This is one of the best parts of the book and shows the love Søren has for Elle in the best possible way.  Søren believes in true consent and, in a Jesuity way, educates Elle so she has the opportunity to understand with her mind what is required of her body.  Each lesson was interesting and compelling.  Unfortunately, toward the end of Elle’s story, as she balances her college education with classes about submission and sadism from Kingsley, Reisz just tells us that this erotic education is occurring without describing the curriculum.  The story pulls back from the intimate details of the first two-thirds and goes big picture with a corresponding loss of intimacy between Elle, Søren and me.  It was a rush to finish without the immersion of the earlier part of the story.

This is an erotic novel and my preference for erotica is that the sex is hot and keeps me in the moment.  There are two scenes that sparked my interest, a couple more where I was interested in a “hmm, never thought of that” way, and then I was bored.  BORED!!  With an erotica novel!!  So sad.

Primarily I had issues with Nora and Nico’s scenes.  When Nora isn’t telling her story, she and Nico were having sex.  And for a dominatrix, it was pretty vanilla sex.  Bored now.  Want some good stuff.

There are two major scenes with Elle and Søren, and both scenes deal with pain.  The first was layered, passionate, interesting, in the moment, “Wow!!” scene, even without penetration.  It fulfilled a purpose to the story and it totally engaged this reader (have to dip into third person for just a bit, whew).  The second scene, the culmination of the story and Elle’s personal first time was . . . not passionate.  I felt neither the pain she was experiencing as she was introduced to Søren’s sadism and sex in general or nor any erotic tension from the pain.  It felt like a checklist – whip (check), flogger (check), three sentences to describe the bliss of accepting the pain (check), cane (check), etc.  Some checklists can be very sexy, but this wasn’t one of them.  I tried reading the scene again, later.  Nope, still bored.  That is not the purpose of erotica, people.  I chose The Saint to experience the eroticism of domination and submission and pain, but it just felt like the acts should hurt because, you know, whipping, flogging, caning.

I also got a whiff of magic va-jay-jay, in that Elle’s amazing acceptance of the pain Søren dealt out was all that he needed, and all this during her first time out of the gate.

The ending, surprisingly, brought me back into Nora’s corner – the performance of her duty, given Elle’s story, was fabulous and made me cry.  Her final choice was surprising, but logical to the character as depicted in the pages I reade.  And none of it was sexual.  Hmmm.

So, a grade.  The clear explanation of choice and what consent is, especially in the context of the play Søren needed, was highly appreciated, as was the story of the 16-18 year old Elle and the bit around the task Nora had assigned herself.  Definitely A level.  But the oddness that was the sex scenes was so not good.  But I’m boosting the grade to B- because I enjoyed the writing.

“Desire is not a sin. . . . Fantasy is not a sin.  Sins are acts of commission or omission.  Either you do some act you’re not supposed to do[,] . . . [o]r you fail to do an act you should do. . . . Finding someone attractive is no more a sin than standing on a balcony and enjoying a lovely view of the ocean.”