For the Love of April French by Penny Aimes
LGBT Contemporary
August 24, 2021 by Carina Adores
ARC
Review by Melinda
This is a debut by trans author Penny Aimes for Carina Adores and there is so much to love about this book! As a trans woman April French has been through so much in her life. Luckily, she has a safe space she does go to quite a bit for kink and that is where she meets Dennis right at the beginning of the book.
But it turns out that he is the new big important boss at her job and she realizes this the very next work day after they have sex. And the realization and the way it’s dealt with within the text is what kept me from rating it an A. But first, let me list the reasons this book is so good. April is a complex, messy character, and if you’ve read any of my reviews before, I love a messy character. And that Aimes allied her trans character the space to breath and just…*be* messy? I loved that so much. Many times with underrepresented characters they are portrayed as perfect and I appreciated that we get such a full character here.
April is strong and proud, which makes her anxious in accepting anything from Dennis, Which makes their kink play complicated as it plays out throughout the book, as part of their kink is caretaking and dressing her up. Which is hard to explain – I’d never seen this kind of kink represented and fleshed out so fully on page, I thought the author did a really wonderful job of explaining how this works for them, as well as why Dennis wants to do this and April’s issues with it. There is a power imbalance between them inherently with both money and cishet privilege, and they both acknowledge it and discuss it. Dennis uses his money to buy April clothes and dress her up from far away, and it’s an interesting dynamic that plays out.
Dennis is a Black man and he makes some mistakes early in their relationship in regard to April’s trans-ness. But he openly acknowledges that and apologizes. There is some conversation between the two of them talking about his experiences as a Black man and how they can relate to each other on their…micro-agressions they’ve faced in their lives.
The two of them together work really well as a couple. Dennis is such a soft Dom and this book felt very much like a soft BDSM book, and one I would rec as such. There is a late scene that I loved so much with Dennis coming to April’s side, without her asking for, that brought tears to my eyes because she truly needed someone but was too proud to ask. I felt like their work situation was wrapped up in a satisfying way, and overall I really liked almost all of the plot points.
What didn’t work so well for me is the execution in places. The pacing of the book didn’t quite work for me because of how it was pieced out. In the first part of the book the POV switches off, and then in part two we get a 6 month window from April’s POV, then the same 6 month window from Dennis’s POV. This completely threw me off and I couldn’t get a handle for the pacing at these points – I understood exactly why these choices were made, but I don’t think it worked that well.
This is a great debut and I can’t wait to see what else she writes.
Content Notes: transphobia, misgendering, discussions of transition surgery
Grade: B+
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