"The Journal of Dora Damage," Belinda Starling

I picked up this book During My Travels and it turned out to be a good airplany sort of read. The story is simple - London bookbinder's wife has to take over from her husband when he falls ill and ends up binding pornography for rich men with time on their hands. Binding porn turns out to be a dangerous business, and it's all complicated when Dora's employer's wife forces her to take on a hot ex-slave as her assistant. It all ends with tattoos in uncomfortable places and candlelit sex, as it should.

I can't utterly dislike any novel that has pornography binding as the basis for its plot (there are lots of good descriptions of 18th- and 19th-century naughty books, and Dora's reaction to the forbidden material she was reading struck true). However, I found Dora too agreeable a character, which is always the danger in first-person historical novels - the supporting characters have the attitudes of their time and place, while the viewpoint character expresses thoughts that are similar to the reader's moral code. Voilà, instant sympathy for the heroine. (It usually is the heroine - the common tactic is to make the men in the book nasty misogynists even by the standards of the day, and the women proto-feminists. Which implies that the only reason that a woman would want her own power in the world is in reaction to living with a brute, but there you go.)

Maybe it was the Generic Proto-Feminist Heroine deal going on, but I found myself more interested in the side characters and their pasts and futures - Dora's opiate-hooked, sex-abhorring husband, the frivolous wife of the leader of the pornography club (I didn't buy her ending - not for a second), Din, the educated former slave who goes back to America to lead a rebellion. I mean, crazy sexual repression! Class conflict! Slave rebellions! Forget binding porn, that's porn-worthy stuff right there!