Logan is the first book in a new multi-author series Dad Bod Doms. I was totally on board with the idea of the series before I had even read the first book. Romance novels tend to skew towards depicting young protagonists falling in love for the first time. The stories told in Dad Bod Doms, are not the stories of how these couples met and fell in love.
Rather, we join our four protagonists, Logan, Henry, Ray and Faris, four middle-aged men contemplating their marriages. Once cocky buff twenty-somethings who were active in their BDSM lifestyles, they now find themselves losing touch with their wives as real-life responsibilities of jobs and children and other grown up stuff have crept up on them. They realise they haven’t prioritised their love of the BDSM and their love of their partners as once they did. They make a pact during their annual camping trip that they are going to sort that shit right out.
This is Logan’s story. It’s a brilliant start to the series and lives up to the promise of the book series concept.
I was so angry with Logan at the beginning of the book. I was supposed to be. Despite promising himself and his best mates that he is going to be a better husband to his wife, Felicity, he goes straight home and is an arse about housework.
It’s all too familiar territory for many readers. The concept of wifework, the fact that childcare seems to fall by default to women, even in marriages where the bloke feels like he’s contributing equally. He runs roughshod over Felicity’s suggestion that she’d like a weekend away with her mates (like the one he’s just enjoyed) and fails to recognise that his wife, a mother of two small children with a demanding full-time job is close to breaking point.
She loses her shit with him after he pushes her too far and throws him out of the house. At this stage, Logan is baffled by the idea that he could have done anything wrong. Bloody furious with him, I was, I can tell you.
But Felicity and I weren’t the only one’s mad at him. Felicity’s best friends are supportively furious too. Logan slinks off to his sister and her partner’s house and they’re bloody furious with him too.
So happily, Logan gets a clue. He has enough self-awareness to be mad at himself once he puts himself in his wife’s shoes. He recognises that he has work to do and, to be fair to the guy, he gets on and does it.
This is wonderful story about a long-established married couple reconnecting. The set-piece in the book is a weekend away that Logan and Felicity take together. This includes two evenings in a BSDM club. These scenes are a delight to read and seriously hot as hell.
Steamy as those scenes were (and they are really steamy, I can tell you), this book doesn’t pretend that a couple of hot intense nights of kinky sex is all it takes to get a marriage back on track.
Marriages take work and happily, Logan and Felicity are prepared to put in the work it requires to truly find one another, and themselves, again.
Felicity is a great character, strong, resourceful, yet exhausted and plagued with self doubt, she was all too easy to relate to. I loved the scene when she is trying to decide what kinky fetishwear to wear to a BDSM club, and worries far too much about how her middle-aged mom-bod will look. I hear you, sister.
Logan, despite his earlier twattishness, is great too. I was rooting for this couple the whole way through the book.
This is a brilliant start to what I hope will be a great series. Next in the series, and next up on my Kindle To Read list is Raisa Greywood’s Henry. I can’t wait to see how his story pans out. I am now thoroughly invested in the lives of the Dad Bod Doms.
