BOOK REVIEW: Further Explorations, by David Russell

BOOK REVIEW:  Further Explorations, by David Russell

    Further Explorations

Janice and Cedric, from Russell's previous book Explorations, are at it again, the more risky the encounter the more fire it held. At times I felt as though their sexual temperature intensified by separation, leaving them free to indulge with others and report back to each other, via e-mails, their specific adventures.  Then they dove deeper by becoming swingers which took them to a higher level.

The experiment was intensified by the different liaisons each had apart from each other, and  by those retro fashions, especially when spiced with a layer of high culture, which could generally be relied on to frighten off a lot of the less desirable company but left a bit of stuffiness that is all to common with high culture.

For both Cedric and Janice, living the lives they led born of ambition and the need to achieve the “pressure from each side was stifling.  But when they buffeted into each other, the opposition of their sides was cancelled out.”  In this arena they were free to experience the carnality of their desires unabashedly.

They both always operated from the position of cool ‘detachment’ in their daily lives, “but what a turn-on they got when something could really shake it, deliciously galvanized by fear!” Old time fashion added a certain arousal to the game as did Cedric’s hint of androgyny and Janice’s near-boyish form.

For me, the flow was too mechanical to be sensual.  It seemed more like an intimacy of two intellectual minds as opposed to intimacy of two bodies melding in sensual pleasure. My preference for sensuality allows for the journey to be relatable, something I have fantasized about or experienced up close and personal. 

Instead what I got was the hope that with the next turn of the page sensuality would be exposed in a meadow of flowers or on a beach with the waves symbolizing the crash against skin and the rising of passion leading to the explosion intensified by a vortex of total surrender – which I imagine they experienced on some level as they traveled the world seeking potential partners.  But all of that was disguised in words that belied the true experience of the coupling.



                                                           Reviewed by:  Connie Jordan
                                                                                      January 21, 2016