Our Some Sugar on It Anthology Edited by M. Rode

I picked up this anthology from TQ because I tend to like their anthologies. They often provide a good mix of stories and have a solid set of authors who contribute. It didn’t take me long before I realised that maybe this anthology wasn’t quite to my taste and also that many of the stories were very similar.

The general premise of the anthology is that of stories which contain some sort of confectionery or sweet food stuff. This ranged from chocolate, candy or even honey. This is all well and good, but I’m not wholly fond of stories where food is used as a sexual enhancement and since quite a lot of the stories revolved around a sex scene where food is drizzled over one of the heroes and then licked off by the other, then I spent most of the time reading those stories shuddering about how terribly sticky it all was. Those of you, however, who love stories where the heroes cover each other in food as a form of sexual play will probably like the stories a great deal!

Having said that, there was one story like that in the anthology which I did enjoy, possibly because it was such a fun and over the top scenario, I couldn’t help giggling at it. The story was The Candyman Can by Rob Rosen and tells of a steamy hot encounter in a sweet shop. The various inventive uses for the sweets such as candy bracelets and lollipops meant that I don’t think I shall ever be able to view those sweets in the same light again!

Not all the stories used sweets as sexual aids though and I found that those were the stories I enjoyed the most. For example, Favorite Dish by Cari Z was a follow on story from Wanting More, which can be found in the DSP Sindusty 2 anthology. I loved the original story and was very pleased to revisit the characters of James and Alex, and to get to see some of their HEA. In this story the sweet stuff was a caramel apple pie that Alex bakes for his friend Johnny so the focus was more on the couple and how they are coping with the fact that James has to work away so much. Great stuff.

Another story which is possibly my favourite from the anthology is Going to Eleven by Lee Benoit. It featured a young man, Chip, who has had a string of real bad luck with boyfriends and how he meets shy berry farmer Bartholomew. I loved the ever-optimistic Chip who was determined that each new boyfriend was ‘the one’. He contrasted nicely with the steady and sensible Bartholomew and I was cheering them (and the cat) on all the way.

As I said earlier, one of the problems with the anthology was that many of the stories were just very samey. Nearly all the stories are short – at about 10 pages or so – and each story involves at least one, if not two sex scenes. This left very little space for plot and most of the stories were structured so that the main focus was on the sex scene. This didn’t mean that the stories weren’t well written because many of the better stories managed to fit in enough characterisation for it to be a romance rather than just dressed up porn. One such story was Banana Ice-cream by Emily Moreton which told of two ex-army men who take a short holiday because one of them is suffering from a stressful time at work. This was a follow on from a previous short story by this author but I still got a good sense of how much the men loved and cared for each other.

So whilst I can’t say that any of the stories in this anthology were badly written, quite a few were easily forgotten. It means that I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this anthology to the readers of this site, and it gets a grade of 'Good', but some of you may still enjoy it, especially if you like sticky sweet stuff mixed in with your sex scenes.

Buy this book HERE.