I've been on a romance-binge lately so look away now if this is likely to traumatise you.

Megan Hart's Pleasure and Purpose has kind of a skeevy premise. It's set in a lightly sketched fantasy world, which, from the level of technology, seems something like Victorian England to me, and the dominant religion centres around the notion of “Solace.” If a soul finds perfect Solace, even if only for a moment, an arrow appears in the God Sinder's quiver; when the quiver is full, the Holy Family will re-unite and bring peace to the world. And thus we have the Order a Solace, an (I think?) all-female, religious organisation. The task of its handmaidens is to bring solace to its patrons – which may involve sex, along with largely unspecified other things. The five tenets of the Order of Solace are:

1. There is no greater pleasure than providing absolute solace.
2. True patience is its own reward.
3. A flower is made more beautiful by its thorns.
4. Selfish is the heart that thinks first of itself.
5. Women we begin and women we shall end.

Uh, right. I know it's a Victorian-influenced setting but that's just a bit too Victorian for me. On the other hand, it's clearly just a framework on which to hang a series of fantasies in which women bring solace to hot, broken men through tea and sexoring. So I guess I can get behind that.

Pleasure and Purpose comprises three novellas, each named after the handmaiden around which it centres: Stillness, Honesty and Determinata. As coincidence would have it, they become involved in the lives of three aristocratic friends – Edward, Cillian and Alaric – whose friendship has been partially blighted by a Dark Incident TM from their past. Over the course of the three connected stories the men are able to heal their friendship, as the handmaidens heal them. Oh, and because this is a romance, they also coincidentally fall madly in love with the handmaidens sent to them and embark upon happy-ever-afters.

I have to say I very much enjoy Megan Hart's writing. I loved Dirty, and I quite enjoyed Pleasure and Purpose, although I found it significantly less remarkable. The style of Hart's erotic prose just happens to appeal to me, I suppose – this is slightly more romanticised than Dirty but I am always impressed by writers who are not ashamed to call a cunt a cunt, instead of a honey-bedewed love cavern. What I really liked about Dirty was how gritty and uncompromising – and within that romantic and hopeful – it was. Pleasure and Purpose is more idealised, perhaps necessarily so, but to such an extent I didn't quite buy it. First of all, you have the uncomfortable problem, as is ever the case in connected romances, of having to include the couple from the previous book – inevitably saccharine and pregnant – to emphasise the lasting nature of their HEA. And secondly I can't help but feel having your haidmaidens constantly running off to have twu wuv rather undermines the central religious premise of the book.

When I read the first story, Stillness, I had no idea she was going to abandon her religious responsibilities to shack up with Edward and I thought for a moment it was going to be a bittersweet succession of 'moments' in keeping with the idea of momentary but profound Solace. But no. This isn't a criticism as such. After all, the currency of the romance is the HEA which is so very often conventional marriage, but, even so, I did find it vaguely problematic. If you are going to have a slightly skeevy, psuedo religious premise then it needs a bit more follow through than this, otherwise the Order of Solace is nothing more than a husband-finding operation. And, for the record, I'm not getting into the Solace/prostitution issues. It's a fantasy.

There's an extent to which the three stories are riffs on each other, romantically and erotically – in the first, Stillness is very much the perfect, archetypical handmaiden (even though there isn't supposed to be one), in the second Honesty has lost her faith, and in the third Determinata is kind of ... um … a dominatrix? The problem is that Stillness feels like the story Hart wanted to tell, and the other two are slightly tepid, unsuccessful variations on it. I quite like Stillness as a character – she is strong and shrewd, as well as sexually submissive (which Edward needs). But she also seems like the epitome of a kind of femininity that makes me slightly uncomfortable – she's patient, and nurturing, and gentle and all anticipatory of Edward's needs, right down to tidying his rooms and waiting for him to come home after a hard day's angsting. Again, given the sort of discussions that we've been having on Fb lately, I want to emphasise that there's nothing wrong with this kind of fantasy but it doesn't appeal to me. And Stillness gets all the best sex – including a wicked hot threesome with two gorgeous guys.

Edward's hand pushed her thighs wider again, and came round the front too. With Alaric's fingers inside her and Edward's on her clit, Nessa couldn't suppress her low cry. It became louder when Edward's soft kiss on her shoulder became a bite.

“She likes that,” Alaric said.

“She loves it.” Edward licked the small wound. “Kiss her, Alaric, I want her whimpering.”

Alaric bent to capture her mouth again, and Nessa had no need to fake a reaction to please her patron; two mouths, four hands, two erect cocks brushing against her, all were enough to make her body respond without effort.

Well, yes, it would be wouldn't it?

Honesty and Cillian's story is part of a broader arc involving Cillian's succession to the throne and his reconciliation with Edward, and Honesty's loss of faith doesn't really seem to be dealt with outside of her being a bit grumpy and giving the beautiful Cillian lots of blowjobs. If anything the plot of Honesty is too 'busy' for a novella – Cillian has to deal with his own madness and his terrible past, decide he doesn't really need to dominate women after all so he can settle down with the vanilla Honesty, overcome a plot to steal his throne, and make peace with Edward (who by the way is super happy with Stillness) while Honesty has to grapple with her loss of faith, fall for Cillian, conveniently leave the order because it just so happens she's a noblewoman so it's okay for her to marry Cillian and sort out her own past o' doom. Phew. As you can imagine, there isn't all that much time for romancin. Equally, after all the harping on about Solace, I felt that Honesty's involvement in Cillian's eventual attainment of it was just a little bit spurious:

“I plead your mercy. I meant to fail you and I did.”
Cillian shook his head. “No, sweetness, you didn't. You went away and left me alone.”
“So I failed you in more ways than one.” Her voice cracked as months of grief flooded it. “I shouldn't-”
He stopped her with a soft brush of a kiss. “I made my peace with Edward. If I'd had you to lean on, I'd never have done that and he and I would still be estranged. I found my solace, Honesty, and it's lasted more than a moment.”

Ah, yes, when buggering off becomes a virtue. The themes of the story are the differences between needing and wanting, but I don't think they quite come through the flurry of activity. I never really got much of a handle on who Honesty was – ironically enough, given her name. And I couldn't actually get behind Cillian's decision to give up on the kinking – I mean regardless of whether the drive to dominate is a need or a want, it just strikes me as a harsh thing to surrender even if you are in love. You might as well ask a gay person to be straight for you. So although Honesty fits nicely in with the story of the three guys, it doesn't stand especially well as an erotic/romantic novella on its own account.

The final story, Determinata, is even more disconnected. Here we catch up with the third friend, the sexually submissive, bisexual Alaric who has been nurturing a life-long crush on Edward and has recently been thrown over by his fiancée and Mistress. He has responded to this by going on a drug-fuelled binge of destruction and so his now super-happy, handmaiden-sporting friends have clubbed together to get him a handmaiden of his own. Determinata has a rather unsentimental, dominant personality – and it is through her direct intervention that Alaric is able to get over his drug dependency and come to terms with himself. Oh, and they find Solace and wuv together, of course. I suppose this story should have been the one most tailored to appeal to me … except, well, it didn't.

I appreciated the fact that Alaric was an a-typical hero, not just in terms of the submissiveness but as the least extraordinary of his friends.

Edward had ever been an ideal. Taller. Stronger. Smarter, hansomer, richer. Better loved. There'd been times with the two of them, Cillian and Edward, Alaric had felt as though he were running along three steps behind them.

I like this idea – that a man who doesn't seem like an uber-male can still have value. But, well, Alaric is just a bit wet. His desire to please is genuinely charming, and he's clearly an expert at cunnilingus which is naturally a bonus, but it's hard to respect to a man who has been so totally wrecked by a woman at the start of the book that he needs another woman to force him to get his act together. And he's just a bit too submissive – there wouldn't be any pleasure in dominating somebody that, I hesitate to use the word 'wet' again but it seems the best description. Bizarrely, I was on-side with his evil ex:

“I served with everything I had!” he cried, pricked at last into anger.

Larissa blinked. “Ah. The puppy bares his teeth.”

“You chose to end our relationship after accepting my ring. You chose it Larissa, not I. You agreed to become my wife and you...” He couldn't continue, not without raising his voice and drawing attention to them both.

“You've not learned a thing,” she told him. “Don't you know there's no joy in requiring submission from a man who never bites back?”

I think this makes me officially evil but it's totally true.

There are, however, some lovely moments of levity in Determinata, which spring from the fact that she herself is rather humourless:

Mina stepped aside, releasing him at the same time so he tumbled onto the floor. He found it first with his face and not even the thick rug could mask the sound of his nose cruching. He let out a stream of mumbled curses that made no sense and cradled his head in his hands, legs askew. Mina watched him calmly for but a moment, just long enough for him to take a few deep breaths.

"Get up."

He looked up at her, blood leaking from his nose, and spat to the side. "By the Mother's invisible tits, who are you?"

"I am your comfort and your grace," she said, without a trace of irony."

I also found the sexual relationship between Alaric and Mina a little bit odd - he orally pleasures her for about a month before he gets anything in return, and they only have Part-A-in-Slot-B sex in the final few pages. What's with this? Dominant woman like the cock too, you know.

As with Honesty, I didn't really see how Mina 'fit' the order, and all three heroine's have to graple considerably with its tenets. I don't know to what extent this is constitutes deliberate criticism of it but it seems that the expectations of the romance genre are in direct opposition to the Order of Solace as Hart envisions it. I don't know if she's going to write more in this world but it seems as though she's given herself rather an impossible task in attempting to reconcile them - and I can't really say she's managed to do so to my satisfaction in this first collection. On the other hand, despite my nitpicking, however, I did enjoy Pleasure and Purpose. It's well-written, the stories and the characters are engaging, and the sex is hot. However, for my own personal preferences I'll be sticking to Hart's modern romances in future.