Saskia VogelReseñas

DNF @50pages

Everything just felt flat to me and I was bored.

This novel looks at the life of 26-year-old Echo, who is struggling with grief and finding her way through.

She has been a working actor, but now the jobs are drying up as their are other younger women on the scene. Her friends begin to disappear as the work dries up. Then her father disappears and is presumed drowned while she and he are hiking on the cliffs near their house in Palos Verdes. She moves home from her apartment downtown. Her mother is deeply depressed.

Echo picks up some work modelling at the local art college, but then her high school best friend's father is in the class--this is the man who ended their friendship when he caught them kissing. Seeing him does not help with her grief. She then meets the neighbor Orly, who is a dominatrix. Orly introduces Echo to the world of foot fetishes and the work available.
———
For me, the best part of this book was in the descriptions of LA. I think this is the first novel I have read set largely in Palos Verdes. But Vogel gets LA, and the descriptions are accurate and sometimes funny. Finding parking, jacaranda trees and their mess, directions, the stale hot apartment, the constant landslide. This story is LA, the two can't be separated.

Permission is an odd little book but very sexy and erotic exploring human relationships. I totally enjoyed reading something out of my normal reading sphere.

I expected more reviewers to compare to 50 Shades of Gray (some of the worst writing ever, btw) based on content. This book goes above that but is still a bit of a slog to get through. You can see the author wants to portray certain ideas and feelings in the bdsm world and maybe has minimum experience but still wants to make a story. It definitely clumps around a bit, then the story arc heightens, then gets muddled again. Some of the ideas seem more like what you might research in the bdsm world, then a few come across as believable and true. Not sure what to make of it, but A for effort. The storyline could be a bit less abstract though.

This book was captivating and interestingly written but left a bit to be desired. The writing style was at times wonderfully descriptive, and at other times metaphors seemed contrived and too much of a stretch. The latter half of the book seemed more well written than the first half.
I found the description on the back of the book to be misleading because there was an indication that Orly's houseboy and Echo would fall in love. That description could be edited to be more in line with the actual plot.
I felt that there were some plot points that were not fully explained and seemed to come out of nowhere, but other plot points were well developed. Overall the exploration of emotion in the book was well done.

A gripping, beautifully written novella about a young woman grieving the sudden loss of her father and discovering the comfort and safety of control, pain, and release. The story follows Echo, who is a young, beautiful actress/model after the sudden loss of her father. Loss is a great word here, because he is literally lost, his body never found, confounding the grief Echo and her mother feel. Echo feel guilty of having been scared of the ocean and the rocks, having somehow caused he father's fall from the slippery rocks into the swallowing ocean, never to return him. Echo's mother also has come complex grief to deal with, as the relationship was permanently on the rocks (ha!) Stuck in a stagnant place in her career, lost in her love/sex life with men who don't seem to want what she wants or see her, dividing her time between her career flat and the house on the bluffs with her mother, Echo meets Orly, the dominatrix next door.

The story also follows Orly's housemate, a man Orly calls Piggy. From his failed marriage and shameful dismissal from a job to the suffering of the emergence of his desires and finally finding Orly, and building a sustainable, empowering friendship and partnership. How Piggy and Orly's relationship will change with Echo in the picture is the crux of the story.

BDSM is treated well and with full understanding in the novel, its everyday complications, its pleasures and dangers, its demands for study and learning and respect all well laid out and worked in to this delicate, smart story. The characters are real people who come at it from very different places and have different ways of learning it, experiencing it, and understanding it. In this sense, a fantastic primer.

Echo's relationships with the two men she has interactions with throughout the novel come at a good time with the MeToo movement. There is a blurring of want and need and desire and transaction. There is also a clear boundary, that, when crossed, is sharp and painful and unacceptable. The encounter with the father of a former (female) lover from high school is rather jarring, and Echo suffers from the shock for a while, just like the grief of her father's death continues to affect her every decision and feeling throughout the story.

Overall, I enjoyed Permission a lot. High recommended, especially for those who like trespassing beach property, surfing, smoking, and lost car keys.

Thanks to LibraryThing and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for my honest review. I enjoyed this novel immensely.

I feel bad for giving a lower rating but this just wasn't my cup of tea. Exciting things: f/f romance, I was able to imagine the settings really well, and the complexities of mother/daughter relationships. Main dislikes (which may be changed in the final copy): Feeling that there was something missing, possibly depth of certain characters (I felt very disconnected from them, but maybe this was intentional?). Confusing in terms of organization at times.

After a bit of a slow start, I fell into this story of sexual exploration in the wake of intense loss.

Echo’s father is suddenly gone: an accident on slick rocks on the California coast. She and her mother are sent reeling through grief, neither sure how to deal with their own or the other’s.

When she meets a new neighbor, Echo feels an instant attraction. Learning she’s a dominatrix only steeps her interest.

In looking at BDS&M, this book has more to say about the nature of love and respect than I would have expected from such a short book. It’s not going to be for everyone, but if you are curious about that lifestyle, I think you’ll enjoy it.

Echo's father fell from the cliffs by her home overlooking the ocean. They were on a hike together, and suddenly, he was all alone. The body was never recovered. In the wake of this accident, Echo and her mother are adrift. Her parent's marriage was turbulent and much resentment remains. Echo is a failed actress who has already aged out of the industry at twenty-two. Her career disappointments pair with her grief to render her directionless. But when she makes friends with her neighbor - Orly, a dominatrix - she begins to reexamine her mental life and believes that her life could be different.

This is a very thoughtful book which delves into human intimacy and desire and how to love someone with respect to their preferences. A tender and lyrical meditation upon the greatest themes of life.

I wasn't certain I was going to like reading Permission by Saskia Vogel when I started the book. At its end, I still wasn't certain I liked it. The whole short book was a ramble, and perhaps that was intentional, but it just didn't click with me. I received Permission by Saskia Vogel as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program in exchange for this review.½

This was a meandering, meaningless read. Echo is a depressed model, and fills her time having random sex. She meets a dominatrix named Orly and strikes a friendship. Orly is aloof and distant. There is disgusting humiliation on a male sub named Piggy. Nothing really erotic, to me. What a vapid read.

A story of a young woman grieving her father, and finding her confidence again in the world of BDSM sounded great, so I was delighted to receive an ARC from librarything.com but this book was so boring. It was what I used to make myself fall asleep for weeks because after two pages of reading my eyes would start to close.

But somehow I got through it. The writing wasn't bad, but the story was extremely muddled, and didn't seem to have much of a point. The pleasures derived from BDSM were inferred, but they weren't really explained, and the other strong emotions (grief, frustration) weren't written about in a way that made me believe that anyone was feeling them. The author seemed to tiptoe around the meat of the story, making everything a so-so description of what could have been happening.

I definitely won't be recommending that my library purchases this book since it's a waste of time, and it doesn't have the earnestness of a book like The Story of O (which Permission has been compared to) or the camp of Maestra. It's an OK book with OK writing and an OK story. Nothing too special.

because echo has lost her dad in a freak accident, she seeks someone to fill the warm spot left by him. it is definitely sad that her mom does not enjoy life and cannot give echo what she seeks in a single child and mom relationship. she finds that and more in orly, a dominatrix!. the book has a slow start and only picks up when its about to end.

Thank you LibraryThing and Coach House Books, for advanced reading of Permission, by Saskia Vogel. This book was very interesting, well written, letting you feel for each character, and sexually honest.