I like Anais Nin's erotic fiction - it is really unusual: base and erotic at the same time - and some of this is directly from her life (key point: her life, not only - or even in spite of- her fantasies). She had a fairly real inner dialogue going for the main male character, and I applaud the notion that people are people in whatever time they live. I was disappointed enough to take the time to write this critical review, because I think that the writer's underlying idea has great promise. Quite a few loose ends left loose as well. In this way it was like a regency romance written during the 50's. None of the dirt and grit of the period - or much to ground it in a different time. For all it's apparent 'naughtiness', the book was strangely antiseptic. Had it been marketed appropriately, I would not have had false expectations.

A Jackie Collins meets Barbara Cartland, masquerading as a serious, albeit playful, first novel.

Literally (and literarily) embarrassed, I felt as if I was learning something about the writer's inner life that I was not meant to see. I felt embarrassed listening to these hackneyed scenes, because I felt as if I was eavesdropping on the writer's own rather immature fantasies, instead of being immersed in a world of idiosynchratic and characters. or even realistic - (God knows 'real sex' is interesting enough to warrant an HBO series of the same name). The worst of it is this: if I am to be given lengthy descriptions of sex play, it had better be original and erotic or possibly comic.

How did the Pink Carnation save England? What became of the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian? And will Eloise Kelly find a hero of her own? Eloise Kelly settles in to read the secret history hoping to unmask the Pink Carnation's identity, but before she can make this discovery, she uncovers a passionate romance within the pages of the secret history that almost threw off the course of world events. The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, a wildly imaginative and highly adventurous debut, opens with the story of a modern-day heroine but soon becomes a book within a book. Eloise has found the secret history of the Pink Carnation�the most elusive spy of all time, the spy who single-handedly saved England from Napoleon's invasion. What she discovers is something the finest historians have missed: a secret history that begins with a letter dated 1803. Deciding that true romantic heroes are a thing of the past, Eloise Kelly, an intelligent American who always manages to wear her Jimmy Choo suede boots on the day it rains, leaves Harvard's Widener Library bound for England to finish her dissertation on the dashing pair of spies the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian.

The secret of the pink carnation