Book Review – Daddy’s Game by Normandie Alleman

Daddy’s Game is a wonderfully engaging, sweet, sexy book.  I am so pleased I read it because I almost didn’t.

Although, I adore Normandie Alleman’s spanky pirate books, I avoided reading any of her Daddy’s Girl series for a while. I’m not really into age play and having ‘Daddy’ in the title did put me off.

Why bring dads into it? Dads aren’t sexy! Well, my dad certainly isn’t. (It’s possible my mum might disagree with that but I’m not going to think about because parents + sex = ewww.). You know how it is with kinks that aren’t your kink. They always seem a bit weird.

I am not going to bang on about my age-play bafflement. I don’t want to come across like one of those people who leave reviews on my favourite books saying “I liked the romance in this story but it was ruined by the hero continually turning the heroine over his lap and spanking her. Why did he keep doing that?” I just want to respond to the review saying “Because spanking makes everything more awesome, do you see?”

Daddy Morebucks and Daddy’s Game aren’t really age play stories, anyway. Although, the books’ heroes like their ladies to call them ‘Daddy’, the sugerdaddy/sugerbaby dynamic is more about the characters enjoying a relationship at the sweeter end of the BDSM spectrum than about any child/parent role-play. There are definitely no diapers in here.

I enjoyed Daddy Morebucks but I’m going to concentrate on Daddy’s Game in this review. Partly because I read it more recently but mostly because as a love story it is just about perfect.  Not only is it well written, it contains two of the best drawn, most believable characters I’ve come across in an erotic novel.

The heroes, Carmen and Natron grow and develop throughout the story in believable – and not always expected – ways. Natron is a successful American Football star. When he sustains an injury which prevents him playing for months and threatens his entire career, his and Carmen’s responses to it – both good and bad – are credible and engaging.

There’s quite a lot of sports talk in the book. As I made clear in my review of Katherine Deane’s The Coach’s Discipline, I am really, really not into sport.
You’d be hard pressed to find someone less into sport than me, in fact.

So I am afraid that I skimmed through some of the more sportsier passages in Daddy’s Game. Once you start talking about quarterbacks and scrimmages and pass plays, I just zone out. It’s not like I’m ever going to learn the rules. I haven’t learnt the rules of real sports; I’m not going to bother with a ridiculous made-up sport like American Football.

While I might not have understood any of it, the sporty aspects of the book provide a nice background against which the drama of the story can play out. Natron’s high profile career as a professional sportsman contrasts nicely with Carmen’s job as an artist. It showcases Natron’s personality as a high-achieving forceful man whose competitive edge drives him to go for the things he wants.

The sex scenes in this book are super hot as the pair enjoy all manner of dom/sub sexy fun. There was a pony play segment which I did find a little weird. Not the bridle and ponytail butt plug which was fine but the post sex scene in which Natron has Carmen lick his spunk from a bowl. I felt a little bit queasy at the thought of it. If I’m dealing with a gentleman’s bollock yogurt, I want it to fresh from the source, as it were. Once it’s been sitting around, congealing in a bowl, it’s rather unappetising.

Still, you can’t fault the characters (or Normandie Alleman) for their inventiveness.

I loved spending time with Carmen and Natron. As people, they were far from perfect. Often their behaviour made me want to bang their heads together and then give them a jolly good talking to. “Natron, stop taking your frustrations out on Carmen. Carmen, stop leaping to conclusions. Both of you, talk this through.”

But you know what, that just made me like them even more.  Relationships aren’t always easy and the difficulties Natron had to overcome were real enough that I’m prepared to give him a bit of slack. Ultimately, the real reason I got frustrated with them was I cared about them so damn much. I really, really wanted things to work out for them.

Normandie Alleman has paved the way for plenty more books in this series. The ‘Daddy’s Little Girl Club’ – a group of girls which includes Carmen from this book and Marley from Daddy Morebucks – has plenty more submissive sugerbabies with stories to tell. I can’t wait to hear them.