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Member Since: Dec. 26, 2014

Aleksandra Culver

Smashwords book reviews by Aleksandra Culver

The Adventures of Silver Girl on Nov. 16, 2020

If you like erotic mind control, i cannot recommend this book highly enough. i put off reading it for a long time because i didn't think i was a fan of superhero(ine) stories, but this book proved me very wrong. It is the best erotic MC story i've ever read, bar none, and i'm pretty sure it will stay that way until i read more Silver Girl books. ;) The book can kind of be divided into two halves. The first part is buildup, all of which is extremely necessary. First, it needs to explain who Sarah LaSilvas is. Then it needs to show how her life changes as she encounters Chronos (this is discussed in the blurb). Then it needs to introduce the key players, of whom there are many, as well as showing more about what Chronos is. There is some additional buildup that i can't really explain without spoiling important details. The second half of the story is, in a way, a hero's journey. i won't say too much about this because spoilers, except to note that it follows many of the story beats you'd expect, but it does so in a brilliant way; there is no plot armor, no deus ex machina, just characters using their actual strengths in ways that are consistent with what we know about them. The Silver Girl / Midas City universe isn't an established property. This isn't a story that follows the typical rules of a familiar genre. It has the ambience of a comic book, but it follows distinctly different logic. It needs to establish not only how the "outside" world works, but how the "web of hypnosis, mind control, and far more intimate situations with the women of Chronos" works. It needs to show the range of power that exists in the universe -- and it's quite a big range. The amazing thing is, for all that setup, it actually stands alone. If this had been the only book that was set in this universe, it still would have felt satisfying. i'm of course overjoyed to know that there are like 50 zillion more books for me to read... but i've read stories that are entirely setup, and at the end, you're just left wondering, "when does the actual story start?". That's definitely not the case here. And i can't say this enough times, so i'll just say it again... this book is ridiculously, absurdly hot. The scenes with Silver Girl and one character in particular -- all of those scenes -- are literally the hottest things i've ever read. i loved one particular scene so much that i commissioned a story specifically inspired by it. There are so many different kinds of mind control here, and the book makes all of them feel different. Each of them is extraordinarily hot in its own way. In most stories i've read, even novel-length ones, there is one type of mind control, or at most two (maybe there's one "magic" or "tech" type, and one original-flavor hypnotist). So it's really unusual to see a novel that can make mind control feel so different every time.
Dusty Origins on Nov. 28, 2020

The tiny, dusty goth gets an origin story! I love many things about Dusty Origins. I love how it expands the Midas City universe; we know a lot more about what makes metahumans possible. We get to find out where someone's powers come from, which is something we hadn't previously seen for any character in Midas City. And, most importantly, we get to see inside Dust's dirty mind for the first time, getting a first-person perspective as she has some hot, dusty fun.
Silver Eclipse on Feb. 09, 2021

If you liked The Adventures of Silver Girl (tAoSG), you will probably like Silver Eclipse (SE), too. (I'll explain the "probably" in a moment.) But that's not because SE is a rehash of the first book. Not even close. SE firmly establishes the Silver Girl series's intentions to tell a complex, intricate, and engrossing story, one that will take place over several volumes. If SE is any indication, each book will be meaningfully different from its predecessors, and that makes me incredibly happy. There's no doubt that SE will appeal to tAoSG readers. It's chock-full of dark, twisted mind-controlling fun. If i recall correctly, there's only a single speaking character (not counting Silver herself) who appears in both tAoSG and SE; the new cast means a whole new collection of mind controllers, a whole new collection of methods, and all sorts of fascinating new settings, plot twists, and character interactions. So what makes SE different from tAoSG? First, it's a lot sexier. tAoSG had a tendency to "fade to black" right when a scene would approach physical intimacy. In SE, the sex is described in all its glory. To me, it feels like the author got a lot more comfortable describing sex and intimacy, and it makes the story feel more complete. Second, it's a lot darker. The core setting in tAoSG offered a certain degree of coziness and comfort; this is absolutely nowhere to be found in SE. Some readers might have enjoyed tAoSG by pretending that Chronos was more light and fluffy than it actually is, but SE forces readers to confront the darkness directly. Finally, SE isn't afraid to challenge and dissect its characters (not literally!) in a way that tAoSG mostly shies away from. Overall, i think SE is a stronger, richer book than tAoSG was. It combines and amplifies the heat of tAoSG with whole new levels of character development and story arcs. tAoSG could have been a standalone novel that could have been endlessly repeated, pulp-style; SE is an inseparable part of what is clearly going to be a long, epic story. So if you liked tAoSG -- and if you liked it for reasons other than pretending that Chronos was actually consensual somehow -- you owe it to yourself to read SE, too.
The Memory Remains on Feb. 09, 2021

Silver Eclipse (SE) could have been a retread of The Adventures of Silver Girl (tAoSG); instead, it took our heroine out of her comfort zone, and threw challenges at her the likes of which she had never faced before. But if SE was different from tAoSG, The Memory Remains (TMR) is 10 times as different from both. In some ways, especially starting from Chapter 8, it's almost an entirely different genre. In TMR, for the first time, Sarah LaSilvas gets to be a person with emotions. Sometimes, they're sad, even painful. Sometimes, they're joyful. Yes, sometimes, they're horny. But whatever they are, they're not magical or artificially induced; they're hers. Sarah is able to grow as a character in ways that the first two books barely even teased at. She ends the book in a dramatically different place than she started, and that's because of her own choices, not just things that were done to her. It feels weird to say, but TMR was the least hot of the three books so far for me, even though it has my favorite "non-villain" mind control scene in the series (in Chapter 5). The second half of the book (Chapter 8 onwards) mostly focuses on sex that's taboo in a different way (pseudo-incest), and there wasn't enough mind control to make it particularly hot for me. But, to be honest, i don't care. As a novel, not just a collection of sex scenes, i think TMR succeeds brilliantly, and far outshines its predecessors. It finally gives Sarah a place in the universe, and gives us a reason to care about her beyond just wanting her to get mindfucked in new and interesting ways. There are so many places she could go from here, and i'm so excited to see where she ends up!