DUCK! by Kim Dare

Duck! by Kim Dare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m not into stories about shifters, shedders and suckers.

Too often writers just use the alternate form to allow the character to do things they can’t in real life. Be more powerful, more dominant, more macho.

I’m a big fan of Kim Dare’s writing. I love her GAY stories. Yes they’re short, but each one shows her understanding of her characters and how their very nature affects their coming together and their relationship.

In Duck!, Kim has done three things and done them very well.

First, she’s taken the standard 15,000 word relationship story she excels at and expanded it by creating a new world around the characters.

Then she’s done the next step. The step her stories have been lacking, by finding the one thing that could threaten their relationship, and exploring what happens when this conflict eventuates.

Finally, she's used the shifting, not so much to explore the form of the different being but to explore what that form means. This shifting could even be seen as allegorical and relate to real life. What happens to a relationship when one of the duo inherits something or changes.

K.A.Mitchell did it really well in A Regularly Scheduled Life when one of the couple becomes famous. In this case, there's a change of role when one is reluctantly forced to accept his birthright.

Being about dominance and submission, as all Kim’s stories are, this shift in hierarchy places stress on the relationship and needs to be dealt with.

This isn’t so much an ugly duckling story as a story about understanding the difference between submission and subservience. It also exlores the difference between domination and superiority. I have trouble stomaching this relationship sometimes, but when you read something like this:

I thought about what my submissive would want. I thought about what he'd need in order to be happy under my protection.

You start to see how dominance in a way can be a form of serving.

The saying that every great leader sees himself as the servant of his subjects isn’t that far away from the truth. It would be nice to think that every leader who filled that role had someone behind them who knew what they needed and made sure they got it.

I can just imagine how Ori's relationship with the world would and should change over time as he settled more into his birthright.

Oh, and on a more important front. I love the way the curve of the "U" on the cover so lovingly curls around the guy's arse....


View all my reviews

FIVE STARS