Information

• Eight Kinky Nights by Xan West
• Format: eARC
• Source: author
• 380 pages
• Genre: romance
• Amazon
• GoodReads
• Rating: 8/5

Summary

Newly divorced stone butch Jordan moves into her friend Leah’s spare room, ready, at 49, to take on a new job and finally explore kink and polyamory. But moving to NYC during the holidays sends grief crashing through her, and Jordan realizes that when she isn’t solely focused on caring for others, her own feelings are unavoidable. Including her feelings for Leah.

51 year old queer femme Leah, an experienced submissive kink educator who owns a sex shop, has recently come to terms with being gray ace and is trying to rework her life and relationships to honor that.

Leah has a brainstorm to help them both: she offers Jordan eight kink lessons, one for each night of Chanukah, to help Jordan find her feet as a novice dominant, and to create a structured space where Leah can work on more deeply honoring her own consent, now that she knows she’s gray ace.

She’d planned to keep it casual, but instead the experience opens cracks in the armor Leah’s been using to keep people at a distance and keep herself safe. Now she needs to grapple with the trauma that’s been impacting her life for years.

Can these two autistic queers find ways to cope with the changes they are making in their lives and support each other, as they build something new they hadn’t thought was possible?

This kinky polyamorous Chanukah f/f romance includes a friends to lovers, roommates to lovers, kink lessons, seasoned romance and getting your groove back tropes, and polyamorous, gray ace, pansexual, Jewish, fat, autistic, disabled, arthritis, PTSD and depression representation.

Review

Y’all this book. I was not expecting to see this much of myself in a kinky romance novel. Both main characters are fat, Jewish, and autistic, three aspects of my identity that I rarely see. Leah is gray ace and Jordan is disabled.

I know I’m mostly just going on about the diversity of the book, but it wouldn’t be the same without it. Towards the beginning we meet Marcos who is aroace and in a queer platonic relationship. I’m also aroace and in a queer platonic relationship so seeing it on page was amazing.

The fact that most of the representation is #OwnVoices means so much. The way that Jordan and Leah experience being autistic taught me so much about myself. I also learned a lot about what it’s like to be stone and more about BDSM in general.

The part that I related to the most was probably Leah’s complicated relationship with her mother. Her mother seems like she acted exactly how my mom does in regards to being super fatphobic. I had to stop reading multiple times when the mom was discussed because it just hit so hard. I needed to see it though because now I know that it’s very much not okay but also that it’s possible to get through it.

Overall, the Eight Kinky Nights is amazing. The characters feel very real and I connected with many of them. I’m happy that this book exists and maybe reading it will become a hannukkah tradition.