There seems to be a little bit of everything here for everyone into or curious about BDSM. But forget about the sexually graphic content; you like it or you don't. What of this work as literature or cultural commentary? If you knew the liberating non-fiction works of Ms Brame previously, you like I might have expected some sort of literary manifesto from this author. Instead it was just a long, sometimes tediously titillating narrative of what goes on in such places, albeit an ideal one, with unrelenting rudeness towards the pathetic anti-hero as the central focus. The ending was surprising, or more properly, unexpected, because it didn't really arise organically out of the groundwork laid out by the novel. I was troubled by the lack of ethics implied by the final resolution. [...] I must be listed among the clueless as well, because I found nothing liberating about this novel.