Dear readers, I have found it: the Unholy Grail of Bad Sex Scene Writing. Sadly, The Literary Review doesn't appear to have given out a Bad Sex in Fiction Award since 2020, but if they still did, I would immediately nominate The Obsessed Mage and His Beloved Statue Bride: She Cannot Resist His Seductive Voice. This is not because, like many other smutty light novels, it indulges in seventy-page sex scenes or excessive use of the word “slurp.” This book wins my nomination based on a single line on page 178: “With a grunt, he filled her like a pastry.”

As any reader of romance fiction, light novel or otherwise, knows, sex scenes need to titillate and show the emotional intimacy between the lead characters. Unlike pure pornography, the goal isn't just to describe the act of sex, it's also intended to demonstrate how their emotional and physical bonds are inextricable. Since this book, part of Seven Seas' Steamship line, is meant to be the light novel equivalent of a western bodice ripper, that expectation is firmly in place, something largely borne out by the rest of the novel. And that makes the line stand out more. It's the pinnacle of terrible, unsexy description, and while I'd still say that the novel version of The Villainess and the Demon Knight (which you can read in our Fall Light Novel Guide) is a more poorly-written book, I cannot let this go without mention.

It stands out all the more because the novel is not, as a whole, terrible, or written terribly. While elements of its plot risk turning away some readers, it's generally a fun, quick read with some real elements of pathos. The story revolves around Lara Bradley and her apprentice Alistair Gardiner. The two first meet when Lara is twenty and Alistair eight – she's a Royal Mage asked to take the boy on as her apprentice. Lara's fairly low-ranking in terms of her magical power while Alistair is ludicrously skilled, but he's been abused to the point where he risks going out of control. The hope is that Lara, who also survived childhood abuse, will be able to reach him emotionally, thus saving him and the kingdom from him. The fly in the ointment is that Alistair, by the time he's twelve, has developed what most people assume is just a crush on Lara – something proven to be him being deeply in love with her when she's presumed to have died saving him from a dragon.

But Lara has not died – as an Earth mage, she's able to turn herself to stone to prevent being digested by the dragon. Since she assumes it has twenty years left in its lifespan, she sets the spell to release, never guessing that a bereft Alistair would slay the dragon three years later and retrieve her “statue” from its gut. When the spell breaks, Lara discovers that Alistair has enshrined her in the manor he got as a reward for taking out the dragon…and now he's thirty-two, still deeply in love with her, and in a position to do something about it.

While this won't work for all readers – for all intents and purposes, Lara was Alistair's adoptive mother, even if he never saw it that way – where author Crane excels is in showing the emotional scars both Lara and Alistair carry. Before being taken in by Lara, Alistair's parents attempted to murder him, while Lara learned to turn herself to stone to avoid extreme physical abuse at the hands of her parents. Both desperately need love, but look for it in different ways. Ultimately, they're searching for a family, and that's really where the romance comes in. Told through dual timelines, alternating between the present and various moments in the past, the story does a very nice job of showing Alistair's emotions and turmoil, and if it's not quite as adept with Lara, we can still understand where she's coming from and why she makes the decisions that she does. That said, Alistair can be quite aggressive with Lara once she's de-petrified, and the revelation that he was playing dress-up with her statue and using it as a masturbatory aid skirts the line. He does know that was wrong on his part since he knew she was alive under the stone, but that's not enough to make up for his actions.

Still, this is probably the strongest of the light novels the Steamship imprint has released thus far. With that notable exception mentioned before, Crane's writing is smooth, and she doesn't skirt around the harsher parts of Lara and Alistair's pasts. The illustrations are attractive and not too implausible, and the book does fulfill the obligations of the romance genre. It's the sort of book you can read in an uninterrupted afternoon, easy reading for a lazy day. It certainly isn't perfect, but that also makes it good for an unintentional chuckle or two even as you hope that things work out for the couple at its heart.