TEST
Jackie Ashenden is great at writing hot sex scenes, and you’ll find those aplenty in With the Lights On. Unfortunately even a sexy romance needs a plot, and with too much narration and too little momentum, With the Lights On is a low-watt bulb.
Under the name Honey, Maggie makes a living working as an escort, providing both emotional company and physical companionship – yes, sex with clients is on the table. Her favorite client is Trajan, who has booked her for one last night. She didn’t even check the message before heading to his apartment. The short version of her character description is that she’s a healer and a martyr, which is a perfect match for Trajan.
Trajan is slowly losing his sight to the eye disease retinitis pigmentosa. He originally hired Honey for practice at navigating social interactions without vision – things like serving drinks, preparing a memorized recipe, and holding conversations. However, over their time together, he’s come to want more. And this night, he’s hired Honey for sex – which Honey didn’t realize.
The pacing of this book is just… off. They think, they talk, they boink, they talk, Maggie finds out Trajan’s secret, they talk some more, they boink some more, they think some more, the story resolves. I had no urgency to keep going.
The first few chapters provide endless info-dumps about how Maggie and Trajan have formed a mystical bond beyond escort and client. Trajan notes that “Maggie opened up to me, revealing personal things about herself, things I sensed she didn’t usually talk about with a client.” Maggie says she’d never thought of Trajan like her other clients, “because he wasn’t like them.”
But all of this is told, not shown. We don’t see any other client interactions, or have flashbacks to early Maggie and Trajan. We just have one night, marked by dialogue, endless introspection, and lots of melodramatic narration about Maggie “joining him in the darkness” and whatnot. It’s especially frustrating because the book is only 160 pages. Yes, this is standard for the Dare line – but so much word count is wasted on navel-gazing that you could have freed up entire chapters for other scenes, which would have given this relationship some oomph. As it was, I felt like I was reading an extended epilogue for an established secondary couple from a previous book.
Trajan’s tragic backstory is that because of his fading vision, he ended up in a car accident that severely injured his passenger. He says that the lesson he learned is that he has to both “refuse to give into fear” and “take control,” but he then lives in a way that is completely dominated by his fear that people will find out that he has RP, and gives the disease complete control over his life. I’m not saying there is any right or wrong way to respond to a life-changing diagnosis; I’m just saying that with all the self-psychoanalysis the book indulges in, Trajan ought to notice this.
And the idea that he became a self-made billionaire – in engineered textiles, no less – while being 75% a recluse and legally blind is a lot. I also never really understood why he and Maggie take it for granted that it’s impossible to have a relationship moving forward, except as a plot obstacle.
The book picks up in the middle because that’s when the sex happens, and Ashenden is good at sex scenes. There’s a balance between dialogue and action, and the characters remain present as their personalities in the scenes. I was surprised to find anal sex here. I haven’t been keeping up with the Dare line, but I don’t recall reading anal sex in Harlequins before.
One last annoyance: Maggie refuses Trajan’s offer to support her through medical school. Apparently him paying her for company and sex is fine when they are not dating, but accepting the financial support of someone if you’re actually in a relationship with them is a no-go. Well, maybe, but… I think that taking a medical school scholarship when you’re dating a billionaire is kind of a dick move. There are people out there who actually need that money, Maggie.
I’m not a fan of angst when it’s used as a euphemism for ‘wallowy self-indulgence’. Ashenden’s knack for sex scenes is what brings this book back up to the C range, but I still wouldn’t recommend it.
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Grade: C
Book Type: Contemporary Romance
Sensuality: Hot
Review Date: 15/05/21
Publication Date: 04/2021
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
I'm a history geek and educator, and I've lived in five different countries in North America, Asia, and Europe. In addition to the usual subgenres, I'm partial to YA, Sci-fi/Fantasy, and graphic novels. I love to cook.
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You’d think nearly killing his passenger would teach Trajan that he needs to give up control so her doesn’t accidentally murder someone, but apparently we needed a reason for him to want to be a top in d/s situations.
There’s actually been anal in the Temptation line as well as in the Dare line, for the curious.
A couple of things you have pointed out, Caroline, would stop with me with a screech of wheels from this one. I used to work with someone who had RP. It’s something that develops over a fairly long period of time and so my friend underwent training and education from instructors for the blind in order to live with it including using a guide dog. So here is a “billionaire” who uses someone who is virtually a prostitute to learn to navigate the sighted world for social and practical skills? Afraid that is just crazy. Why not professional help – he could afford it! And as for him apparently driving a car with serious sight issues? He should have gone to prison for that, especially as he caused serious injury. Trajan was considered one of the best of the Roman emperors; afraid that this Trajan couldn’t possibly be. I might have given this a D if I’d reviewed it but, admittedly, I didn’t and I won’t so thanks for multiple heads-up, Caroline.
Sarky PS – was the anal sex because he couldn’t find the other orifice in the dark??
While I think you have some good points about the writing and potential resources available to people
with RP, I find this “joke” unfunny and crude. I didn’t want it to sit here with nobody having said anything about it.
Sorry if I offended you, Caroline. Or snyone else.
I’m curious as to why he’s not in prison, too, unless it was somehow deemed not liable.
I don’t think the RP was diagnosed until after the accident. He hadn’t realized he was losing his peripheral vision at that point.
Yeah, but that still wouldn’t absolve him of killing someone. Like I’m sure it’s accidental but it’s have to be provable.
Jackie Ashenden is one of my favorite “queens of angsty heartache” and I liked WITH THE LIGHTS ON a lot more than you did. Several of the most recent Dare releases have featured stories that basically take place over the course of a single night—and I thought WITH THE LIGHTS IN, and Ashenden’s earlier book, IN THE DARK (the heroes of the two books are best friends), did a good job of making that work. Also, I liked Ashenden’s matter-of-fact presentation of sex work: she doesn’t glamorize it or make it lurid, it’s just how the heroine pays her bills. Ashenden has a template that always involves angst-ridden characters from dysfunctional families with dead/distant/absent/abusive parents who relate to each other through shared dysfunction, with running inner monologues, and, oh yeah, really hot sex—and WITH THE LIGHTS ON is cut to that pattern. The Dare line never really did find its footing (you’re right about the anal sex: there have been references to it in previous Dare books, but I haven’t read any anal sex scenes as explicit as the one in WITH THE LIGHTS ON in any Dare book before) and now Harlequin is discontinuing the line. Perhaps like Prohibition, the Dare line was a noble experiment that failed. Now bring back Harlequin Blaze!
Yes, I definitely appreciated the lack of judgment in Maggie’s work – but I felt Maggie didn’t handle it professionally. Imagine not even checking to see if the client had booked sex! And she switched places with someone to fill in for her with another client so she could go to Trajan – I’m assuming this is the premise of the other book in the duology – but that is dangerous, and it even says that she’d get in trouble with the agency if they knew.
The switching places really bothered me. Here’s how it’s presented in the story :
“My evening had been booked by someone else, a guy who wanted only sex and who paid outrageously well to get it […] I’d let my best friend Vesta convince me to let her have the black-star client while I spent the evening with Trajan. It was an extremely bad move, as Vesta wasn’t actually employed by Strangers.”
How is this fair to the client? When someone hires a professional for sex, chances are they want a professional for sex, and it’s disrespectful to pull this kind of switcheroo on them (even if the whole premise is that the sex with the friend is going to be the best the guy ever had, because she’s not a professional and is doing it out of deeper feelings). I don’t even want to imagine the legal issues or liabilities that would open up in this situation.
“I don’t even want to imagine the legal issues or liabilities that would open up in this situation.”
This might actually fall under “rape by deception.” Ick!