AngelFire's Reviews > Stealing West

DNF @ 36%. No rating.

This is my fault and I shouldn't have bothered picking it up. It clearly markets itself as erotica and it's not trying to be anything else but MM historical western romances are very rare and I love enemies-to-lovers so I wanted to give this a try. Unfortunately, it's not my thing at all.

Even though it's tagged as MM romance, historical romance and erotica, I wouldn't classify this as anything except erotica. There's very little attempt at historical authenticity with both characters talking and acting like they're living in 2022 and the authors leaving gaping plot holes everywhere (like how the two men spent days chasing each other across the desert but somehow they never had to stop for sleep, water or food and their horses didn't require any rest or food either?). You could have removed the horses and old-timey clothes and stuck the two MCs into a contemporary setting and nothing would have changed. Actually - things would have made way more sense in a contemporary setting.

I also wouldn't classify this as a romance because there is none. The characters meet and they start having sex right away. That's it. There's no build up, there's no character development and the characters getting it on together made zero sense and wasn't realistic at all. I felt nothing for either MC or their so-called romance. However, a lot of this is standard in erotica, which is partly why I didn't rate this.

Another nail in the coffin is that the smut wasn't even that great. It was pretty standard but what eventually turned me off completely is how unhygienic and unpleasant the sex is. The authors did know that condoms didn't exist in the late 1800s and people generally didn't go around with bottles of lube in their pockets. But the authors took the approach of not including condoms or lube but they kept everything else about the smut scene the same, which didn't work for me. For example, using precum as lube, doing very little prep and having the guy on the bottom having his pants just below his waist doesn't equal a good time IMO. Never mind doing bareback on Day 1 and then having that same dangly bit getting a blow job on Day 2, when there was absolutely no bathing/cleaning done in between. Not my cup of tea. Hygiene is a big issue in historical romances, which is why I expect authors to do a bit of research and use some common sense when writing smut scenes.

Lastly, the captor-captive situation really bothered me. I tend to avoid this trope because the resulting non-con/dub-con situations make me uncomfortable. Especially because in 99% of the cases, the author wants readers to ignore any consent issues and think the scenes are sexy. The situation was the same here and that made me uncomfortable. Their first sex scene is flat out non-con IMO and the later scenes that I read were definitely dub-con but you could make the argument for them being non-con as well. It didn't matter that Leon found the situation sexy. He had zero input on when and how sex happened and that's not my thing. I should have known before getting into it that I'd stumble across this scenario but I was too excited to have found a historical western enemies-to-lovers to think more about my choice.

Anyway - it's not for me but I'm happy so many people liked it.