The Camilla Affair

The Camilla Affair
Cecil Ballerino
Double Dragon Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-55404-428-3
Fiction, Literary Fiction
Reviewed by Eugen M. Bacon

Harry’s swinging party or not? Choices or lack thereof. Might a 12-step program fix sexual addiction? J. R. Cervantes’ liaison with Camilla Faith Jones, a free thinking relativist, awakens his demons. Everything he believes in goes topsy turvy as his inhibitions fall away like scales in a paradigm shift that threatens his very logic if not his essence. Out of the frying pan, he stumbles into Claire Windsor, a demure rose that is not quite as reserved as she presents, a niggling suspicion that troubles JR enough to cyclone his world.
The story plunges into a web of mystique and inter-relationships, near deadly power struggles with ponderous outcomes. The human body. Mind games. Self expression. Reproach. The Camilla Affair is a powerful novel of liaison and the compulsive psyche. Exemplary quotes open each riveting chapter, tossing the reader into a corporeal drama that leaves body nerves tingling.
I knew at first glance that I was onto a winner, a most pleasurable read that completely hooks with its profundity, deviance and deep awakening that “beggars the senses”. The story questions sexuality, and the moralistic fiber of it. What validates ethical responsibility? In comes shrink, Dr. Hartman. The reader watches in awe as JR transforms from his prudish narrative at the start of the novel to a fiend he secretly harbors, an uncontrollable one that conflicts with his inhibitions. Reading this, Karma Sutra pose 47 is perfectly spotless.
Cecil Ballerino paints beautiful characters each flawlessly defined, and the vicious circle that contains their assurances to each other, of each other, the inclinations that break those assurances and the beguiling nuances in between. This psychoanalytical thriller presents writing that is tight, light and witty, unhurried yet engaging with a massive twist in the end. Devoid of sporadic typos, misplaced parentheses and dangling quotation marks (aspects easily contained with a refined edit perceptibly wanting), The Camilla Affair might muscle in and outrank crème de la crème New York best sellers. Seriously.