Review: Xan West – Eight Kinky Nights

I previously read Their Troublesome Crush, Tenderness, and Nine of Swords, Reversed by Xan West, which has cemented them as one of my favourite romance authors. The author kindly sent me a digital review copy of Eight Kinky Nights in exchange for my honest review.

Goodreads Synopsis

Sometimes the perfect Chanukah gift can change everything.

Newly divorced stone butch Jordan moves into her friend Leah’s spare room, ready, at 49, to take on a new job and finally explore kink and polyamory. But moving to NYC during the holidays sends grief crashing through her, and Jordan realizes that when she isn’t solely focused on caring for others, her own feelings are unavoidable. Including her feelings for Leah.

51 year old queer femme Leah, an experienced submissive kink educator who owns a sex shop, has recently come to terms with being gray ace and is trying to rework her life and relationships to honor that.

Leah has a brainstorm to help them both: she offers Jordan eight kink lessons, one for each night of Chanukah, to help Jordan find her feet as a novice dominant, and to create a structured space where Leah can work on more deeply honoring her own consent, now that she knows she’s gray ace.

She’d planned to keep it casual, but instead the experience opens cracks in the armor Leah’s been using to keep people at a distance and keep herself safe. Now she needs to grapple with the trauma that’s been impacting her life for years.

Can these two autistic queers find ways to cope with the changes they are making in their lives and support each other, as they build something new they hadn’t thought was possible?

This kinky polyamorous Chanukah f/f romance includes a friends to lovers, roommates to lovers, kink lessons, seasoned romance and getting your groove back tropes, and polyamorous, gray ace, pansexual, Jewish, fat, autistic, disabled, arthritis, PTSD and depression representation.

Review

Note to self: when in need of comfort, pick up a Xan West book. Honestly, these books feel like such a warm hug, and it’s very clear that Xan West goes out of their way to create a safe space within them.

This was a fairly slow book, and it took me a while to read it, but there was also so much to love about it. First of all, it had my favourite trope ever: friends to lovers. And these women were not just friends, they had been friends for around 30 years. Which meant that they were already really close and knew each other really well, and it was amazing to see their relationship developing.

Something else I really loved is once again the autism rep. Xan West’s books just have such amazing autism rep, and it again made me very happy to see.

I personally hardly know anything about kink, but I feel like I’ve learned a lot from this book, because it was set up as introducing a new dominant to kink and the kink community. So it was both a book I could really see myself in and a book that helped me learn about people very different from me – I call that a win!