Slay Me Tender

by Jenny Scholten

Plushious Velvet, featured artist at the Naughtyland strip club, disappears, and a bloody breast implant leads Aubrey Lyle to a drug ring using Asian prostitutes. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1892281155
• ISBN13: 9781892281159
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: New Victoria Publishers
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Watch out world, Aubrey Lyle is back!

Twenty five years old, Aubrey is worried about how much longer she can work as an exotic dancer. Her knees are aching and her breasts are sagging. Actually, Aubrey claims they've always sagged. Nevertheless, this awareness of the vulnerability of her livelihood to her physique and the extreme measures other dancers go to, particularly in regard to breast enhancements, are central themes to Slay Me Tender. The novel opens with Naughtyland's weekly feature dancer (usually porn stars from out of town), Plushious Velvett, complaining to Aubrey about the hardening of the star's very large breast implants. When Plushious disappears, leaving part of her wardrobe and fails to appear at her next scheduled club, Aubrey's natural curiosity gets peaked. Then she finds a gun, dark poems written by Plushious and what appears to be a bloody breast implant in the building where Plushious was staying, Aubrey can't help but start looking into the disappearance. Scholten portrays the colorful and seamy aspects of the housing shortage in San Francisco and the gentrification of the infamous Tenderloin district with amusing detail. Her strengths are her characters and sense of humor, particularly irony. Aubrey shares a flat with four other people. It's a wonderful, motley group. There's Vivian who is working on her thesis and exploring non-monogamy much to the strain of her relationship with the quiet Zan. There's the beautiful and vibrant artist, Geoffrey who is "tri-sexual" (as in he'll try anything sexual) as well as his current, and frequently present, boyfriend, Gregor-with-the-red-Renault-convertible. And finally, there is shy, neurotic and modest Hugh. With his photographic memory Hugh provides most of the roommates fashion accessories from thrift store where he works and looks after everyone including Aubrey's cat, Hodge. Added to Aubrey's regular roommates are the feature dancers who are temporarily staying at Aubrey's place (along with their manager or body guard or girlfriend, etc.). These are just a few of the amusing, yet realistic and compassionately drawn characters in Slay Me Tender.A fiercely independent young woman of Southern white trash ancestry, Aubrey continues to be ambivalent about her job. She defends the choice of employment. "With what other job could a history major without computer skills make three hundred dollars a day?" (page 26) When a roommate makes disparaging comments about "those women," she points out that she is a worker in the "sex industry." Yet Aubrey is realistic about the potential problems of the job. She worries about how long much longer her body will be "profitable" as a dancer, and the possible dangers of overly "friendly" customers. She carefully avoids being in debt to the older police officer who is a regular at Naughtyland. Yet she is a constant witness to the victims of the industry's "victimless crimes." At one point, Aubrey is surprised at her own stereotyping of customers' wives. She realizes that her assumption

An original voice

This book, and her first, are well-written, informative, and entertaining. It's written from a point of view I hadn't heard before.

Fasten your seatbelt ...

If life were fair, this book would be on a best-seller list. Scholten is a remarkable writer -- bold, humorous, and radically original. It's hard not to love her irrepressible heroine, Aubrey, and I hope she will be back with many more tales to tell.