Movie Reviews: An Unexpected Love and Tru Love

An Unexpected Love
March 2003
Lesbian/ bi?

An unhappily married housewife and mother of two children (Leslie Hope) separates from her husband and gets a new job where she develops a mutual attraction to her female boss (Wendy Crewson)

Whole movie is on youtube if you don’t mind Danish subtitles.
This movie apparently was produced and written for Lifetime TV. I don’t know if it ever showed on TV but if so, kudos to them. I don’t think I’ve seen a made for TV movie that specifically dealt with a lesbian relationship.

So… I really liked this story. Both actresses did a great job and it felt believable. Yes, it is the cliché of the unhappily married woman who unexpectedly finds herself attracted to a woman for the first time, but it was well written.

What I liked about it was that all the characters involved act how one would expect they’d act in this situation. Kate and her husband are mutually OK with splitting up, although her husband would be fine keeping the status quo. Kate has always wanted to be a wife and mother and that’s what she went for. They have a nice upper middle class existence, but Kate is just not happy and decides that she wants a more fulfilling life.

She ends up working for Mac at Mac’s real-estate agency. Mac is an out lesbian. Both women get closer as they work together and Kate finds herself attracted as more than a friend to Mac. Mac is very leery when Kate professes that attraction because, um, Kate is straight and Mac doesn’t want to be some straight woman’s experiment and she doesn’t want to be a straight women’s secret lover. Mac has lost the love of her life and is also reluctant to find someone knew.

While they dance around each other trying to work out both an attraction and mixed feelings about that attraction, Kate gets the guts up to tell her husband, children and best friend about her attraction to Mac, which goes over…not well…at first.

This movie is a kind of a sweet romance, but it also deals realistically with all the issues around homophobia, possible “gay for you” as Kate can’t really say she’s now a lesbian, and fear for glbt person being used as a fling. It also addresses certain stereotypes of what straight people think about gay relationships. I liked that it wasn’t cheesy, nor was this movie melodramatic. In fact, all the characters act rather maturely for this kind of situation, considering.

The only negative thing I will say is that it did come across as too insta love for me at first on Kate’s side. There is a nice build-up of a friendship between Kate and Mac, but those special things that would occur between two characters falling in love seemed missing. They are just normal, good friends one min and suddenly Kate is kissing Mac out of nowhere. I would have loved to see more sexual/ romantic nuance between the women before that first kiss. However, it is an HEA and still an enjoyable movie.

Heat level: 2-- semi naked, sweet sex scene
Grade: 4 stars

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Tru Love (Canadian)
2013
May/ Dec- lesbian/straight

A widow, recovering from the death of her husband, comes to the big city to spend time with her busy professional daughter. Instead, she forges an unlikely relationship with a commitment-phobic lesbian who has a past with her daughter.

I had watched A Perfect Ending, which I loved, about an older / younger women relationship. So I was attracted to Tru Love, hoping it would be as good for me as the other because it’s also is about an May/ Dec female relationship. Tru Love, while compared often to A Perfect Ending, is a very different film though, and can’t be compared really. Well not in story. I will compare it when it comes to personal feelings about May/ Dec love representations.

Maybe it was just my mood, but for most of it I felt a bit uncomfortable watching this. And while I just said Tru Love should not be compared to A Perfect Ending, what made that less uncomfortable for me was the fact that that relationship started out and is based on a business deal, so the lines are clear at the beginning and age difference wouldn’t be a factor in it. In this movie, it’s really about a love that develops between a 60 something woman with a late 30’s something woman.

For some reason, I felt a kind of dread throughout  most of the film mainly because I wasn’t sure I wanted to see these two characters actually fall in love and be intimate. And I’ll be honest in that probably my discomfort is that I’m an older woman myself and would feel weird being with a much younger woman like the one in this film. Although, actually, if I would put myself in the position of a younger woman attracted to an older one, that wouldn’t have made me feel uneasy at all.

Tru is a lesbian who seems to be fairly callous in her relationships with other women. She won’t commit to anyone and seems to have one night stands and brief relationships one after another, not even bothering to remember their names. Suzanne, one of those past women, asks Tru, who still has the key to that Suzanne’s house (side bar- I wonder how real it is that lesbians having brief affairs give each other keys to their houses after a few nights, which seemed to be the case in this movie), to let her visiting mom in. Suzanne is a lawyer and a workaholic.

Due to Suzanne never being home, Tru sort of entertains Alice, Suzanne’s mom. They like each other right away and start getting very close to the discomfort of Suzanne. On the one hand Suzanne is feeling a bit jealous of time her mom is spending with Tru, but on the other she won’t stop working. When she sees that Tru and her mom are getting a little too close she tries to thwart their relationship, which upsets both Tru and Alice, who think the other is avoiding.

As for Alice, her husband has died and for the first time she feels free to let go and enjoy life. The ghost of her husband is there and talks to her when she’s musing, so we get some background on what Alice’s life has been about.

Alice’s zest for life and enjoyment of Tru, and maybe also because she is an older woman who Tru relates differently to than women her own age, makes it easier for Tru to open up about her painful past. So we get to see why Tru is a commitment-phobe.

This story is just as much about a mother/ daughter relationship as an f/f relationship as tensions rise up between Alice and Suzanne about Tru. It also makes Suzanne confront her avoidance of any kind of a life outside of work. She’s very uptight and this cracks her shell.

So the crux of my discomfort is that I felt Tru and Alice connecting as two people might with that kind of age difference, but couldn’t see it entering into a more intimate thing, which it did. On the other hand, truly, I think I ended up liking this film because it does show that love and relationships between people can go beyond what society might deem appropriate or not. (between consenting adults) And I appreciate stories like this that go outside the box.

I’d definitely recommend this story if you’d be open to a May/Dec story with a much older woman.

Heat Level: 0 implied sex, no nudity

Grade: 4 Stars

Review- Bailey's Run by Ali Spooner

Bailey’s Run
By Ali Spooner
Jan 2, 2014
Contemporary/ Lesbian/ Mystery/ Paranormal
358 pgs
Publisher: Affinity Ebook Press NZ LTD
Kindle Edition

Bailey Chambers mourns the loss of her lover, Nessa, in an unsolved carjacking. When Tommy, Bailey’s brother becomes a victim of a gay bashing, Bailey assumes his case will be handled the same way as her lover’s—lackadaisically.

Desi Dexter assigned to Tommy’s case, feels Bailey’s disdain toward her and her partner. Through tenacious police work, Desi, is able to uncover the reason for Bailey’s attitude, and convinces her that she is sincere in solving the case.

Mutual attraction sparks, and before they can move forward with their fledging romance, Desi, and her partner Braxton, uncover the presence of a serial killer.
What will happen to Bailey, when, Desi, becomes engrossed in another case, can their relationship survive?

This is one of those stories that was quick to read and was entertaining with a lot of fun characters, but which didn’t really excel in one area. It’s both a romance and a mystery of sorts, however, the romance developed fairly quickly without too much ado and the mystery didn’t have enough tension or mystery actually. Bailey’s Run is carried mainly by a gaggle of characters interacting and several random events happening, which was fine as is.

The two main characters, Bailey and Desi, are very likable characters. Bailey is a truck driver during the week, but works in her Aunt’s bar on the weekends. Many women have been trying to catch Bailey’s eye, but since the murder of her partner, she’s not been interested in dating. For her, her partner was perfect and she has no desire to find a replacement. She’s also still grieving as there was no closure in that her partner’s killer was never found.

Desi is a detective who’s just trying to do the right thing in life. She’s a tough but warm woman and has a good working relationship with her partner who is supportive and doesn’t have judgments that she’s a lesbian. She meets Bailey when she’s called on the case of Bailey’s brother Tommy being severely beaten outside her aunt’s bar. Although Bailey is very cold and snippy with her, she feels a spark between them. Something about Bailey attracts her.

For Bailey it’s the same, but her anger over the police not doing anything about her partner’s death has left a bad taste in her mouth and she blows Desi off. On her own, Desi checks out what happened to Bailey’s partner and totally gets Bailey’s anger since the investigation was shoddy to non-existent. Between working on Bailey’s brother’s case and deciding to work behind the scenes to reopen her partner’s murder case, she manages to become closer to Bailey. Bailey slowly opens up to Desi, feeling attracted to someone for the first time since her partner’s death, and feeling also that Desi is on the up and up with her.

They are very cute and sweet together and the romance develops easily, quickly and nicely without too much conflict once Bailey is on board. While there’s a pretense of staying apart for ethical reasons, they don’t pay too much attention to that on a personal level.

Outside of the romance, there are several plot lines. Desi and her partner Dexter, besides going after the men who jumped and beat up Tommy, get reassigned to cold case after they solve who killed Bailey’s partner. Desi discovers a pattern of killings and they realize that they might have a serial killer on the loose. They also figure that the killings happen around the same date every year and that date is coming up soon.

The author goes back and forth between them and the serial killer, giving us insight into who the killer is and their investigative process. I felt this part was not really that well developed as there was no tension built up in finally finding the killer really. I kept expecting more tension or maybe more danger for certain characters, but that never happened. This part of the story felt more like a reason to bring in more characters and keep the story going.  

Spoiler********************************************************************

Also, and this is something that bugged me, an FBI profiler is brought in. Her father was FBI and she’s allegedly some kind of serial killer expert. She works with a partner, also her life partner outside of the job, who is a psychic. Unfortunately, this part of the story was off to me. Basically, all the FBI profiler does is have her partner do her thing while she does zero investigating. They felt rather like unnecessary and extraneous characters thrown in there to add more character interaction even though as characters go they are likable. And about the psychic thing, well, I think I would have been on board with that if the psychic didn’t come up with all the answers right away versus having an actual investigation, which included some psychic help. Due to that it went into hokeyville for me at times. 

End Spoiler*************************************************

What does work in this story is the connection between all the characters. The characters get together a lot for fun, food, home cooking and entertainment while they deal with what seems like non-stop issues. They have a great camaraderie and all support each other. I loved that Fubar, Bailey’s aunt’s bar, is one of the central places they meet up and that it features drag queen shows. Most of the characters are either gay or supportive of the gay community and that was rather nice to read as well.

And, well, this is stupid and most people won’t care, but there was a rescued kitten. Desi finds it in an alley and brings it home. The kitten actually gets a fair amount of detail and attention and I found myself worrying about it when both Desi and Bailey can’t get home and loving that it was part of the story.

So, while there were some issues for me in this book, overall it’s a good read.

Heat Level: 2 – sex mostly implied not graphically written

Grade: 4 Stars

Review- Business with Pleasure by Keziah Hill

Business with Pleasure: Hot Down Under
By Keziah Hill
Jan 1, 2013
Contemporary/ Erotica/ f-f-m
48 pgs
Publisher: Momentum

For sculptor Lottie Williams, entering her sculpture, Triumvirate, in the Carve the Wind exhibition is the culmination of her career.

What she doesn’t count on is the incendiary lust between her and the curators, James and Magda. While she’s at first happy to play, she rapidly gets out of her depth when she confuses business with pleasure. Against the wild backdrop of the Pacific Ocean her work is displayed to great acclaim.

But all she wants, all she can think about is being back in the bed of the two people who have laid claim to her heart and soul.

I’m going to come right out with it, this is a short, hawt and juicy piece of stroke fiction. It’s really basically one long sex scene, but wow, what a sex (string of scene/s)!

I thought the set-up was good. While on the beach working on an art piece that she wants to enter into an exhibition, Lottie keeps seeing a man who intrigues her. She doesn’t know he’s the owner of the gallery that is sponsoring this event, she only notices how buff and nice looking he is.

When she goes to the gallery to present her piece to the owners, a husband and wife team --James and Magda, she’s shocked to see it’s the guy she’s been eying on the beach. After a discussion reveals that both Magda and James have been admiring Lottie’s work for a long time and were hoping she would enter a piece,  the conversation starts turning sexual as Lottie’s piece is quite erotic. Magda and James overtly try to seduce Lottie and she easily goes along with it. There is a brief blip in this love fest though when Lottie suddenly feels unsure of their intentions as she’s heard rumors about them, but the author managed to infuse a fair amount of real warmth and genuine feelings of attraction between all three.

What is most enjoyable about this story is that all three click sexually without any hang-ups or hesitations. You know that feeling when you can just be yourself and feel free to get your freak on without judgments or fears of being rejected? That’s the kind of feeling this story evoked in me.

Moreover, there was no feeling of one of the parties being left out or any two having a better connection. This is something that I’ve read in threesomes and not liked. No, Magda and James are both equally attracted to Lottie and she to both of them and they all mix it up without any angst. And it’s all left off with them deciding to keep it going.

The only negative thing I’ll say about this is that the author used the word “savage” to describe James way too many times. It felt like it was on every page, although realistically I’m sure it wasn’t.

If you’re in the mood to read a short, erotic f/f/m, I definitely recommend Business with Pleasure.

Heat Level: 5- pretty much the whole story is sex and it’s written graphically with strong, blunt sexual language.

Grade: 4 Stars

Review-Little Black Dress by Scarlet Chastain

Little Black Dress
By Scarlet Chastain
August 12, 2013
Lesbian/Contemporary
70 pages
Published by Evernight Publishing
Kindle Edition

Paris: The romance and fashion capital of the world. So what the hell makes Jamie Scotts, an IT geek from New York, think the city of lights holds the answers? Driven by need for change, she lies to her boss about her fluency in French and becomes the company’s first international sales person. Fluent? She can barely ask for directions to the ladies’ room.

Jamie’s a duck out of water with her low maintenance style and New York accent. Her unsuccessful sales pitch almost sends her home, until she meets the epitome of elegance, Giselle Bianchi. An unlikely relationship blossoms as the dress designer takes Jamie under her wing. Giselle’s guidance not only reveals Jamie’s missing je ne sais quoi, but also unlocks repressed passion with the help of a little black dress.
I read Scarlet Chastain’s Bella Key and really liked it, so when I was in the mood for something short, sexy and emotionally satisfying, I picked up this story. It totally hit the spot and was exactly what I wanted.

Jamie is a smart woman on the fast track in her company. She’s been the top sales person and convinces her boss that she can get the company’s product into the European market. The chutzpah and sales skills that got her where she is in the US doesn’t exactly translate in France, where she’s lacking language skills, sophistication and cultural nuance to open the doors. In a moment of serendipity, Giselle enters her life and things change drastically.

Giselle is an elegant but down to earth woman who has built her own business in the fashion world. She sees Jamie having a hard time at a café and decides to step in to help. They start up a friendship as Giselle helps Jamie navigate the world of doing business in France.

This is a short, but sweet and complete, nothing left hanging or short-changed, story of two women who hit it off and open up to each other without too much ado. Both characters are nicely written and they just click with each other. The setting felt real and added a lot to the feeling that these two are on a romantic adventure and falling in love.

I like these stories by Scarlet Chastain.  They are great for a quicky feel good romance with some juicy sex.

Heat level: 3

Grade: 4 stars

Review- Safe Passage by Kate Owen

Safe Passage
By Kate Owen
Feb 5, 2014
Contemporary/Lesbian/Romance/Mystery
116 pages
Pub: Less Than Three Press
Kindle Edition

While doing renovation on the old New Orleans home inherited from her great aunt, Jules discovers an old safe filled with letters written in French—and code. Enlisting the aid of a local French teacher, the beautiful Gen, Jules slowly begins to learn the truth of her great grandfather's death …

Safe Passage is a cute, fun story with very likable characters who gel nicely. It’s also a mystery of sorts.

Both Jules and Gen are instructors at a school for girls. Both have been eying each other but have kept quiet about it. Jules is an out lesbian at the school, but Gen is more mysterious and doesn’t give away that she’s into women.

They both come together when Jules needs Gen to translate some old documents she’s found that are written in French. Of course, it comes out fairly quickly that Gen is into women and they get together without too much ado.

Both characters are fun and interesting. The author infused a lot of humor and light banter between them, adding to my enjoyment of the book.

To be honest, it’s an easy going love story with no real drama, which is kind of refreshing. I wouldn’t want to read books like this all the time because a little tension and drama is good. However, it’s a welcome change once in a while to have two people click and go for it without constant issues coming in that drag a story just to create faux obstacles for the couple to face and get over. 

As far as the mystery part goes, I think I was expecting a bit more on it. It’s really not that developed and the reveal wasn’t a big wow. What was more important I guess is that the women have something to work on together or have an excuse to interact with an outside objective so they can get to know each other.

But I did like that part of the mystery involved her aunt who was an interesting character, and also, that she was involved in a mix race love story, something scandalous for her time.

What I ultimately felt about this story was that it could be the precursor to these two characters being in a detective series. They work well together, they are great at digging up clues and have good chemistry.

Bottom line, Safe Passage is the perfect, light feel good book to read between two weightier and more serious books.

Heat level: 2- some sex, nothing too graphically written

Grade: 4 stars for emotional, entertainment value
            3 ½ Stars for lack of development in either romance or mystery

Review- The Artist's Muse by Alyssa Linn Palmer

The Artist’s Muse
By Alyssa Linn Palmer
Oct 13, 2013
Lesbian/ Romance
57 pgs
Pub: Bold Stroke Books
Kindle version

Broke and desperate after her girlfriend leaves her for a man, Colette finds a job as an artist’s model. When she arrives for an interview, she’s surprised to meet a striking young woman, Lise Beauclerc. Her relief at not having to pose for a man turns to infatuation as she observes Lise during their sessions, creating fantasies in her mind during the hours she poses.

Colette has no idea if Lise would return her affections, and when she finally gets up the courage to ask her out, their connection is more than she’d ever hoped for. However, a few days later, Lise introduces her to Marcel, her former fiancé. They seem intimately involved, and Colette is devastated. Will her dreams of Lise be unrequited?

I’ll be honest, it took me a while to decide to buy this book. The blurb attracted me but the only other book I read from this author also had a triangle that was hard for me to understand and frankly didn’t work out that great. Then there’s the price, it’s almost $5 for 57 pages. That in itself was a huge deterrent. I think that price point for that amount of words is insanely ridiculous.  But I justified it in my mind with it being published by Bold Strokes Books, which has a good reputation and who charge more because they’re a niche publisher. I accept that. That’s still a lot of money for such a short book, but… I bought it.

I say all that because in the end I’m glad I didn’t go with my hesitations. This turned out to be a really good story even with some issues. I was left feeling good and that I had read yummy, erotic beginning to a love story.

The blurb pretty much expresses what the story is actually about so I’ll go from there.

Who made this story for me was Lise. Since we don’t get her POV, we have to see her through Colette’s lens and any response through action and dialogue from her. Lise seems to be in her own little world while drawing as Colette poses. She doesn’t act like Colette is any more interesting to her than as a prop and inspiration for her art work. I liked that because it was a nice contrast to Colette’s constant inner sexual fantasy musings about Lise, which seemed to go on and on and got a little boring. The mystery of Lise and her indifferent demeanor was what grabbed my attention.

At first I thought the first person present POV from Collette was not going to be interesting because I didn’t find her to be a character that appealing. As the story progresses though, we do get to see more about what Lise is like from her interactions. Unlike Colette, she has a quiet outer reservedness that belies her passionate and maybe slightly kinky personality. She seems much more mature than Collette in how she acts, but is maybe younger? 

This is one thing I kept trying to figure out. Both have graduated college already but Lise mentions that she chose Colette to model because she’s older. However, the vibe around Lise is that she’s the older one. She’s very grounded and self-assured about her work. She also has the money to pay for a model, something I wouldn’t expect of a young, struggling artist. I pictured her at first to be in her 40’s, which as I read on, was not the case.

She also quietly takes the lead in an interesting and fairly erotic way after she accepts an invitation from Colette. It’s something that says a lot about who Lise is, maybe the most telling thing about her and it was nothing she said.

Then there’s Colette. Compared to Lise, she seems to be somewhat immature even though maybe older. She’s instantly smitten by Lise and falls in love with her in like a day. This is something that bothered me about this story. Colette has only posed for Lise maybe 3 times. They spend one night together and Colette talks and acts like they’ve known each other for months and has an expectation of Lise and of a romantic relationship that seemed out of step with the actual amount of time they’ve known each other. It fits her personality as this is how she’s described, that she falls quickly and easily, but for me her attraction was mostly from her own inner fantasies vs any real connection at that point in time.

However, what I did like about her is that she does act on her attraction and gets the guts up to ask Lise out even though Lise has not shown any particular interest and Colette has no idea if she’s into girls. I also liked that she was willing to risk stepping out again after a major heartbreak.

It’s a short novella so there’s not too much depth to this story, however, it was left on a positive note for me. And it was a fairly sensuous story.

The other thing that I enjoyed and which also added to my final positive feeling for the book was the setting. I felt the author really captured the feel of the women living in Paris. At times I wasn’t even sure what time period this is set in. It could be any time since there was no mention of modern technology like cell phones or such. But the women wearing chignons and going to old movies did give it somewhat retro, European feel. Also the world in which they live of artists and theater people also added to the non- contemporary ambiance of this book.

I do kind of wish the That Artist’s Muse was more drawn out and or we could have gotten Lise’s POV as I think it would have added a lot more depth to this story. However, in and of itself it is a good read. I’d recommend it.

Heat level: 2-3- not too racy but not too bland either

Grade: Really liked