Journey from Denial to Acceptance
By Olivia Glass
Fleshbot Fiction, $1.99, 18 pages
Adrian is not your average bride. While planning for her winter wedding, she gives strict instructions that there will be no balloons, flowers, glitter or confetti—Just sacred, feminine fruit. Lucy and Caroline, two of her most serious lovers, are helping with the event. Caroline can’t believe she’s agreed to work with Lucy, whose heart Adrian once broke so she could be with Caroline. It’s a recipe for disaster. Now, with Adrian getting married, Lucy and Caroline must deal with the reality of this loss. But is everything truly lost? In her erotic novella Five Stages of Grief, author Olivia Glass takes readers on an emotional journey as three women learn to live and love again after heartbreak. Caroline, the story’s narrator, alternates between the past and the present, revealing details about how she met both Adrian and Lucy and how their respective relationships evolved and dissolved. The novella’s title refers to a series of emotional stages people proceed through when learning how to live with loss. The story’s five sections are each given a name of one of the stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The nice twist here is that while Caroline and Lucy are initially the ones to experience the loss of a shared love, it is manipulative Adrian who ultimately must pay the consequences for the hurt she has caused. The piece of erotic fiction features both lesbian and bi-sexual encounters and fantasies. Glass’ eBook is a bargain at $1.99. There are plenty of short sex scenes and several long erotic passages packed into 18 pages. Readers looking for lots of descriptive, extended erotic scenes won’t find many here simply because of the story’s length, yet there is absolutely no doubt that Glass is capable of writing these types of scenes. Readers who enjoy her writing style should also look for her work under the name Carmen Maria Machado.
Reviewed by Kathryn Franklin
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