Saskia Vogel

This novel looks at the life of 26-year-old Echo, who is struggling with grief and finding her way through.

She has been a working actor, but now the jobs are drying up as their are other younger women on the scene. Her friends begin to disappear as the work dries up. Then her father disappears and is presumed drowned while she and he are hiking on the cliffs near their house in Palos Verdes. She moves home from her apartment downtown. Her mother is deeply depressed.

Echo picks up some work modelling at the local art college, but then her high school best friend's father is in the class--this is the man who ended their friendship when he caught them kissing. Seeing him does not help with her grief. She then meets the neighbor Orly, who is a dominatrix. Orly introduces Echo to the world of foot fetishes and the work available.
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For me, the best part of this book was in the descriptions of LA. I think this is the first novel I have read set largely in Palos Verdes. But Vogel gets LA, and the descriptions are accurate and sometimes funny. Finding parking, jacaranda trees and their mess, directions, the stale hot apartment, the constant landslide. This story is LA, the two can't be separated.… (more)

I expected more reviewers to compare to 50 Shades of Gray (some of the worst writing ever, btw) based on content. This book goes above that but is still a bit of a slog to get through. You can see the author wants to portray certain ideas and feelings in the bdsm world and maybe has minimum experience but still wants to make a story. It definitely clumps around a bit, then the story arc heightens, then gets muddled again. Some of the ideas seem more like what you might research in the bdsm world, then a few come across as believable and true. Not sure what to make of it, but A for effort. The storyline could be a bit less abstract though.… (more)