Review: The Dominator by D.D. Prince

The Dominator by D.D. Prince
Find the Author: Website, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads
Published by Self Published on January 22nd 2015
Genres: Erotica, Romance
Purchase links: Amazon
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Source: Purchased

Librarian's note: This is an alternate cover edition for ASIN: B00SNRG8I0.

In submission there can be freedom...
Trigger Warning! Dark romance with scenes with dubious/ non-consent, some bondage, and discipline. For mature audiences only.
**
Right after her high school graduation, Tia O’Connor’s absent father tells her he needs her to save his life by being a marker for a gambling debt for just a few days.
Then Tia finds out the truth, that her life is no longer her own, that she’s been chosen to marry the son of a local mafia kingpin, a man whose identity shocks her.

Tommy Ferrano likes to play mind games. Tommy likes to play a lot of games. Tia has to obey his rules … or else.
Rule 1: He owns her and has full control over her. He wants obedience; he punishes defiance.
Rule 2: She needs to keep her mouth shut and reveal nothing to anyone about him.

He soon reveals rule #3 to her, revealing his dark, possessive, and depraved sexual side. Tia has to obey in order to survive. Will it break her or will submission bring about a different kind of freedom?

Tommy Ferrano never wanted a wife, never even wanted a girlfriend. Women were just a means to an end, a sexual end.
Women were always happy to oblige, sometimes too eager, which meant that he had to go over the edge of consent to get what he really wanted, fear then submission.

Tommy needs to get married to get control and handed his birthright --- something he’s worked tirelessly for. His father has a specific girl in mind and Tommy isn’t sure why her but the idea of owning a woman wakes up deeper, darker urges in him than ever. The minute he sets eyes on Tia he feels something inside of him shift, change. And as he gets to know her and finds out truths that have been hidden from him, he starts to change even further.

What’s his father’s motivation for picking this girl? What’s his father hiding? And how can he get what he wants from her without ruining everything?
Ingredients include: profanity, sex, violence, dominating alpha male, blood, pain, love, redemption...
No cliffhanger...

— 3 stars —

 “The Dominator” is the story of Tommy, the son of one of the most powerful Mobsters in the US and Tia, the woman who has been given him as a trade for her father’s debts with his father’s cartel. But can a relationship in midst mob-mayhem, abduction and forced marriage really blossom into real love?

I liked the book. And I didn’t like it at the same time. I’m really ambivalent about what to think of it. The story itself was really good, it kept me interested permanently. But the writing was horrible, to be honest. The author wrote the book like I always tell my 5 years old daughter to NOT speak – like for example put 5x the word ‘and’ into a sentence with maybe a total of 20 words. That just sounds awful.

Then there were the characters. In my humble opinion, Tommy wasn’t an alpha-hero. He was an obsessive jerk with huge anger-issues. The book has been described as BDSM in a lot of reviews I read beforehand. But the sex had nothing to do with BDSM. Maybe it scratched the surface of Edge-Play with a bit of rape-play-ish scenes. But they had too much of a real feel to it to really be a scene for me. Tommy couldn’t reign his temper in and he became violent to her. I wouldn’t have allowed him to ‘play’ with me, but would have made him the ultimatum of either go to therapy and do anger-management or he’d lose me. The female MC had the opinion, that she had to sacrifice herself for the mental health of the man who had abducted her against her will and treated her poorly repeatedly. Sigh. No, just no. This whole back and forth between them was really dampening the whole romance the author threw into the mix. At 80%, I was still convinced, that they’d never be a happy couple because of that never ending push and pull, push and shove – literally even.

Then there was the length of the book. With over 500 pages, it was really a piece of work for me. Combined with the strange writing à la elementary school, it took me almost 4 days to finish it and that is really unusual for me. Let’s just say, I was so annoyed that I finished the last 40% off in one go just because I wanted the book to be over with… And I’m sorry, but that just shouldn’t be the case. I do get, that the length of the novel was kind of necessary for the development of the relationship between the two MC’s and to let the whole mobster-story unfold, without it seeming like the love-story between Tia and Tommy was just a product of a giant case of blue-balls combined with Stockholm-syndrome. But it could have been a little less detailed in unimportant negligibilities and we could have gone with a hundred or so pages less. But ok, it was the way it was.

Whereas I wouldn’t call “The Dominator” BDSM, I’d definitely say it entails quite brutal and degrading sex. It is definitely erotica, but not always sexy in my opinion.

All in all, I rate “The Dominator” with 3 stars and can recommend it to everyone, who doesn’t mind a very shady erotica story, combined with a writing style that need improving badly as well as an extended length. But in the end, it wasn’t a bad book – just not for me.