Lip Service

Rating:
Summary: Lip Service is sexy and erotic and intelligent
Review: LIP SERVICE by M.J. Rose can be seen as highly intelligent erotica or as a novel with elements of the erotic. Either way, it makes for fascinating reading, not so much for the erotic scenes (although they are certainly well written) but for the psychological insight into a troubled woman's behavior and identity. The main character disobeys her overbearing psychiatrist husband first, by not taking pills to help (read: control) her, and goes on to conceal her phone sex activities from him. She finds her strength (and escapes her helpless self into her real self) by asserting her feminine power during phone sex. She learns she has the ability to take a male caller "from one place and help him arrive at another." The activities she is engaged in eventually lead to her involvement with depravity and with the police. LIP SERVICE is sexy, erotic, and intelligently explores the sexual fantasies of the main character and her customers. The juxtaposition of upper ! class dinner parties and scenes of sexual awakening add to the book's interest as well. I highly recommend the novel.

Dean Barrett Author, Hangman's Point Village East Books, NYC Publishers of Fine Fiction on Asia HANGMAN'S POINT - A Novel of Hong Kong

Rating:
Summary: A Stylish First Novel
Review: Take a novel in the style of Danielle Steel. Improve the writing by making it a tighter story with believable characters and more substance. Add a sexual theme as well as a heroine capable of saying a bunch of words Steel's characters probably don't even know, and you get the drift of Lip Service, a stylish first novel by M.J. Rose.

Lip Service's Julia Sterling is an upper east side matron in a marriage that is satisfying financially but not emotionally. Julia's husband is handsome and successful. He's also entirely self-absorbed and doesn't sound especially nice to be around, to boot. A nervous breakdown while she was in college left Julia emotionally weakened and ripe to fall in love with a man like Paul: a controlling single father whose wife had recently died. Paul, a psychiatrist, is utterly out of touch with his own feelings and sexuality. When an opportunity to work on a book about an institute that does sexual research presents itself, Julia takes it: over her husband's protests and behind his back. Her own research for the book finds her doing telephone calls of the phone sex variety,and this device provides much of the erotica for this erotic novel.

Though the plot sounds like a cliché intro to the erotic, there's little that's clichéd about Lip Service. Rose doesn't take us down a particularly nasty road and the journey is more one of an adult's self discovery than sexual reawakening. What makes Lip Service work -- aside from Rose's strong and confident voice -- is Julia's road to self understanding. Her emergence -- as trite as it sounds -- as a whole person. Though Julia is undeniably flawed, aren't we all? Her imperfections make her entirely believable, her failures make her human and her personal breakthroughs give us hope.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty Good!
Review: Lip Service is a very interesting book. The author draws you into the world of phone sex in a concept that I didn't expect. The conclusion of the story seems abrupt and could have used a bit more detail. However, it's an interesting story and is very enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: NOTE from the author - I've not written any reviews:
Review: The reviews that you see with my name on them were sent to me by honest to God real readers who asked me to post for them. This was done becuase these folk were not very savvy with the net and I have all their origninal notes and emails to me.

I wasn't aware that the posts would appear with my name on them as well as the readers. I'm sorry if it is misleading. And the only reason I've given the book four starts is that I couldn't submit this note without stars.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting...
Review: What an interesting concept for a book. I picked this book up at a bargain price thinking it might be an interesting read and I'd get around to it when I had nothing else to read. I'm glad that I finally picked it up! It was such an intriguing tale of sex, lust, love, and maybe even crime. I could feel Julia's pain as she struggled to find the truth in her seemingly loveless marriage and her confusion of feelings with her best friend.

I found the book to be very erotic, until the story got embroiled in a possible crime. It was a very strange feeling going from erotic to disgusting and/or criminal. Total paradox. I enjoyed the book and the plot was one that I had not previously encountered. I definitely found this book intriguing and was glad that I finally picked it up to read!

Rating:
Summary: Dial 1-900-NOT-SO-HOT
Review: I was really disappointed in this self-published novel by M. J. Rose. Although it's regarded as an erotic novel, I found the use of sex in the story quite unimaginative. The sexuality itself pretty stereotypical, almost in caricature, and it really is not used in a creative way to advance the plot.

The characters in this story are drawn one-dimensional. This is quite ironic given that psychiatry/psychology plays a heavy role in the story (the protagonist (Julia) works in the sex clinic run by a psychiatrist). The characters are rendered no more complex than cartoon characters, rather than the richly complicated beings that psychiatry/psychology shows us all to be. The real drama in life is that within ourselves, and how our own complexity interacts with others' - not the simplistic relationships of narrow characters that Rose has written.

My guess is that the author tried to do too much in this novel and ended up short-circuiting her purposes. There are too many subplots for a short novel: Julia's journalistic project to write about the sex clinic, her concern about her loveless marriage, something fishy going on with her husband's business, Julia's ambiguous relationship with an old flame, and her stepson's relationship with his girlfriend. With all these subplots going on, it's no wonder the author couldn't sustain erotic tension as well.

My own personal beef: I was severely disturbed by the ethical transgressions by proprietors of the sex clinic and the suggestion that Julia really could become a clinical paraprofessional with only a few hours training. Perhaps I should have suspended disbelief, but as a licensed counselor, I am quite bothered when the profession is portrayed as simplistic or unethical.

Rose lost a great chance at showing how Julia might discover her own sexuality while being caught up in the intrigue in the sex clinic...and show how her own sexuality played out in the various relationships in her life. She might also have tackled the thorny issue of whether "phone sex" really is sex...but no, in the end we are left with a rather thin story with neither substantial dramatic or erotic tension. Pity.