After discovering her husband's affair with her best friend on their honeymoon, The Bride Stripped Bare's unnamed protagonist begins a journey of sexual exploration with a bullfighter, Gabriel. Told in lessons inspired by a book her grandfather owned, this novel is part character study, part kink study and part unravelling.
I was late to the party on this one. It came out back in 2003, and I still remember the media circus that surrounded it. Released as an anonymous work, a journalist managed to worm out the real author, Nikki Gemmell, before the thing even hit the stands, turning an intriguing could-be-true work into a high-profile fiction novel. It's both a good and bad thing, to read it so much later, I think. Gemmell is doubtlessly a good writer, and her exploration of her heavily flawed protagonist's sexuality makes for an interesting, and often complex, novel. The way the relationships play out too is not always what you expect, and that works as often as it doesn't.
I liked Gabriel. I liked that we never entirely knew him, and that he was as honest as he was dishonest. Similarly, Theo, Cole and the protagonist's mother were all compelling. Even if I didn't like them, I was engaged with their stories, which is a nice way to read a novel. That said, I don't entirely understand why the protagonist and Cole stayed together. She was clearly so devastated after the reveal, and her complete erasure of Theo from her life could have sensibly applied back to Cole. I also struggled with the protagonist's wallowing. It wasn't always bad, but she was such a passive character, and her refusal to take accountability for her actions seemed out of tune with the speed in which she cast judgement on others. Those things aren't necessarily separate; however, it left a bit of an unpleasant taste when we spent a lot of time solely with her, and not with the others for her to bounce off. She was an interesting lead, but not a particularly likable one.
3 out of 5 Elizabethan sex books.
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