In Your Corner

Starred review from May 5, 2014
Castille’s follow-up to the excellent Against the Ropes doesn’t pull its punches. Oakland’s Redemption fight club is now a legalized mixed martial arts training center. Fighter Jake misses his ex-lover Amanda and wants to start over, this time with some substance behind the sex. He reintroduces Amanda to Redemption, encouraging her to train with the colorful cast of friends while teaching her how to rely on people other than herself. Amanda is entirely capable of taking on a wide variety of enemies, from miscreants on the street to blackmailing harassers from her former law firm, but Jake hopes to show her that there’s value in partnership and vulnerability. Like real lovers, Jake and Amanda need to talk, fight, and have hot make-up sex to navigate their complicated relationship. Readers will be in their corner as they battle for each other.

July 1, 2014
Two years after her breakup with Jake, Amanda is fired from her high-powered law firm for refusing, first, to take him on as a client because of their past relationship; and second, because she will not put out for a senior partner. Jake tries once more to get into her heart as well as her bed, but, despite almost sublime sexual compatibility, they almost do not make it because Amanda is a monumental commitment phobe. After a period of crippling depression, she sets up her own shop, wins a major sexual harassment suit against her former employer, successfully defends Jake's friends at the Redemption Fight Club against a fraudulent lawsuit, and manages to redeem their on-again, off-again relationship. For an erotic romance, Castille's pacing is slow, but the sex, when finally encountered, is hot and heavy, with bondage on the menu. Castille's tale of erotica is better written than Fifty Shades of Grey, to which her first book, Against the Ropes (2013), was compared.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)