Review: Comfort Food - Kitty Thomas

Emily Vargas has been taken captive. As part of his conditioning methods, her captor refuses to speak to her, knowing how much she craves human contact. Told in the first person from Emily's perspective, Comfort Food explores what happens when all expectations of pleasure and pain are turned upside down, as whips become comfort and chicken soup becomes punishment.

Comfort food is currently available as an eBook but is coming soon in both hardback and paperback.  The eBook can be purchased from Smashwords, Scribd or on Kindle.  Scribd also has the first 100 pages available as a preview if you want to give it a try.

Check Kitty Thomas' website for more information.

Review:
Emily has been kidnapped, she has no idea where she is and very little hope of escape.  Kept in an empty grey cell with nothing to do and not even a bed to sleep on she quickly becomes desperate for human contact - ANY kind of human contact.  Although she is brought 3 meals a day (always chicken noodle soup) her captor refuses to answer her questions or even speak at all.  Her world has been turned upside down and she will soon willingly submit to anything just to feel the comfort of his touch.

Comfort Food is like nothing I've ever read before but WOW is it a powerful read!  Told in first person narrative by Emily you journey with her from the minute she wakes up tide to a chair and blindfolded.  I loved her voice and it was scarily easy to imagine you were in her place.  Given the situation she was in I'm not sure that anyone would have been able to handle things differently.  The worst thing for Emily is that she can see what he is doing to her but she is powerless to resist.

The book does include scenes of BDSM which I confess isn't something I've read a lot of.  It isn't a light hearted affair with what we would consider normal consent and there is no such thing as a safe word but Emily's captor doesn't do anything without her agreement.  Emily can choose to say no at any time but then she is left alone in her empty grey cell with food passed silently through the door.  Given the choice of nothingness or doing what her captor requests she finds herself accepting anything just to have his company and attention.

Although Comfort Food takes you on a dark and disturbing journey and isn't a book for the faint hearted it is an incredibly powerful story and one that I devoured in an afternoon.  We've all heard stories of women who have been captured and held prisoner for years but it tends to be something that society tries not to think about and rarely discusses.  It isn't something that should be pushed under the carpet though & I can't recommend reading this book strongly enough.  I'm still thinking about the story days after I finished reading it and I know it will effect me for a long time to come.  In my opinion that is the sign of a good story and if you're brave enough to give it a try I'm sure you won't regret it.

Source: Thanks Kitty for sending me this to review.

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