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5.0 out of 5 stars
When East Meets West, 21 Aug 2011
This review is from: Love Has No Limits (Kindle Edition)
Being a Chinese, I was fed up reading all the heavy going stuff about things such as the cultural revolution. Even romantic literature has got that tragic element in almost every book I read outside of China. Therefore, I was rather intrigued when I came across Love Has No Limits on Amazon. I went ahead and bought myself a copy. I must admit that I could not stop reading it once I started.
What fascinated me the most is the author's candid yet sensitive approach regarding the subject matter. Anything with a sexual content used to be a taboo in China. This has gradually changed over the last twenty years. The new generation of Chinese enjoy much more freedom to explore their sexual desires both in their homeland and abroad. Although this is a fiction, I am very certain that the author has drawn from her own personal experiences and those of her fellow Chinese who live overseas.
I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn the truth about modern Chinese women's sexual consciousness. There is no quirkiness or pretentiousness in this book. Beautifully written, sensuous and honest, this is a truly modern erotic gem!
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Erotic Shocks!, 11 Sep 2011
This review is from: Love Has No Limits (Kindle Edition)
Pain is not my thing, normally, both as a recipient and an inflictor (apart from some good, honest spanking, naturally!) but a young Chinese woman deliberately seeking danger in a notorious Amsterdam nightclub riveted my attention right from the start of Vanessa Wu's Love Has No Limits.
Beautifully written and suspiciously autobiographical, the story conveys a mood of stark reality as well as frequent erotic jolts, while the first-person character is hurled from one sexual situation to another - sometimes screaming and struggling against her attacker / lover(s) in scenarios that bend the limits of consensual sex to breaking point. But somehow Beiru never goes to the police as she threatens, mesmerised by the pain and pleasure she's absorbed.
This is initially a dark narrative, painfully detailed with the true consequences of punishing, near-rape, with its risk of permanent physical damage, and even the practical difficulties of wanting to pee while handcuffed to a bed!
But the darkness fades when Beiru returns to Berlin and enjoys a more conventional relationship with a very young man, finally realising that pain is not included in the sexual fulfilment she desperately seeks. Interestingly the threesome aspect of her Amsterdam experiences comes back to haunt her. Her young boyfriend, told of this, comes to fantasise of a threesome that includes Beiru's curvaceous best friend, Maria.
The apparently separate threads of this tale of two cities converge in the closing chapters. A feral friend from Amsterdam comes to Berlin to find work, the sex explodes, and we find that love truly has no limits.
The protagonist, contemplating writing of her experiences reflects that "Perhaps writing a story or a novel was not something that should be done for money, or to win praise, but for the sheer sensual pleasure of it. I liked that idea. It made me want to write lots of stories, to give myself that pleasure."
This is the core motivation in being a writer, in my humble opinion; it is something we have to do and something that Vanessa Wu does very well indeed. We are certainly going to hear a lot more of her.
Review by Roger Frank Selby, latest stories: The Farmer's Gun and Thou Shalt Not Covet.
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