Review:: Break and Enter, by Rachel Haimowitz and Aleksandr Voinov

Title: Break and Enter

Author: Rachel Haimowitz and Aleksandr Voinov

Format: eBook

Rating: ★★★☆☆

I'm not usually the kind to pick up romance novels, but when I saw this one described as "man on machine on man" I just couldn't resist.

I could blame reading this on that reading challenge I'm doing, but to be entirely honest, I'd originally chosen Gone With the Wind as my "classic romance." Granted, I'll probably swap this one in as my romance, but that is certainly not why I read it. I read it because it's cyberpunk M/M romance and I was promised "circuit-scorching cybersex…without a computer."

Needless to say, I was intrigued. No shame.

The prose is actually pretty damn good cyberpunk fare, in my opinion. And the premise is actually not bad. We've got Cyke who's modded out like whoa, and Bear, a first responder who keeps picking him up half dead, geeking out over his mods (and how hot Cyke is). We find out Cyke is a white hat, but something's gone wrong and so he has to figure out what's up and not get killed.

Unfortunately, the pacing was all wrong. There was a lot of lead up, the actual plot was revealed, then there's the confrontation... and then suddenly everything falls together. This book definitely could have done with a couple more chapters. I'm pretty sure Samhain gets pretty particular about lengths of their novels, but there had to be some way to make that pacing work.

In the end, it just felt like "oh, we finally got another sex scene setup, we're good, cameras roll." And that disappointed me because it felt like a lot of work and research and love was put into this novel above and beyond the titillating scenes, only to have it thrown away at the end.

Also, I felt disappointed with the sex scenes. Now, this might just be me, but when I'm promised circuit-scorching cybersex without a computer, I want some serious mod-kink going on. Especially considering Bear is a medigeek. Think of how much fun they could have had... I mean, I get that might be too "weird" for a lot of people, but I felt like it was what I was promised.

From what I've read, most people found the sex scenes pretty hot. So if that's what you're looking for, maybe it'll work better for you than it did for me.