What I Did On My Summer Vacation

What I Did On My Summer Vacation
Chrissie Bentley
Mardi Gras Publishing
ISBN: 1-934329-37-1
Fiction, Adult Contemporary
Reviewed by Dave Thompson

Breathtaking, breathless and brilliantly brazen, What I Did On My Summer Vacation is a vacation in its own right, 49 terrifically paced pages that set out their erotic agenda from the very outset (“if this is how they treat you in First Class, imagine what happens in Coach”), and are over far too quickly.
A New York businesswoman travels to the UK for two weeks of meetings, interspersed with some sightseeing around the Dickensian city of Rochester.
But it is what happens in and around those intentions that powers her story, and the sense that Dickens himself is overlooking and, in some way, approving of her activities adds a wry humor that is as captivating as it is arousing.
So we shift from the bedroom to the riverbank, from the top of an historic monument to the floor of a restaurant restroom (and let’s not forget the photographer’s studio at the end), and every encounter is presented with a vividness that is almost cinematic in delivery and execution.
It would be easy for this catalog of carnality to slip into either crudity or, even worse, repetition. But author Bentley, a veteran short story writer stepping into the longer form for the first time, maneuvers effortlessly around such pitfalls, both via the fluidity of her writing and the strength of her characterizations.
With only a few lines of description, her partners leap fully formed from the page, while their activities are detailed with both experienced expertise and the thrill of discovery. Her first encounter with a naked Englishman, for example, is laugh-out-loud priceless.
With just five chapters, What I Did On My Summer Vacation is as powerful, and certainly as incident-packed, as many books twice, three times its length. It certainly confirms Bentley’s place among today’s most exquisitely (and explicitly!) readable erotic authors, and leaves one yearning for her to turn her hand to a novel-length work.