Review: Lip Service

Lip Service by M.J. Rose

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



GoodReads Synopsis: Lip Service probes the secret world of phone sex and one woman who becomes empowered by what she discovers there. Not since Erica Jong's Fear of Flying has a novel so masterfully examined the relationship between sexuality and identity.

On the surface, Julia Sterling's life seems blessed. Married to a renowned psychiatrist, living on Manhattan's tony Upper East Side, Julia deeply loves her stepson, and is forging a career as a journalist.

When a writing job at The Butterfield Institute - a sex therapy clinic - exposes her to the world of phone sex, Julia glimpses a world that stirs her erotic fantasies but threatens her carefully constructed reality. As she explores her emotional and sexual connections to the men she knows and several she will never meet, she confronts evil, perversity, and her own passions.

My Thoughts: I really got sucked into this story. A bit of history on me, I used to work for a 900# company way back in the early 90s…I wasn’t a phone operator, I was in the background building the program and dealing with the long distance carriers and the FCC. The phone sex operators in this story were using the phone as a means of therapy, rather than the way the 900 numbers were used in the 90s.

The story was riveting. Poor Julia went through a breakdown while in college. The only child of a rather renowned psychiatrist. It was through her father that she met her husband, Paul, her father’s protégé. Paul was drawn to her, but not for the reasons one would imagine. Paul has been more of a live in Dr. to Julia rather than a husband and Julia has allowed it. While researching her book for the Butterfield Institute that Julia starts to come out of her shell and really live. The research journey she undertakes opens up a new world for her in a number of different ways and we get to watch her blossom into a completely different person than the one we are introduced to at the beginning of the story. Her transformation made the book very hard to put down.

I liked Rose’s writing style and apparently this book is a prequel to a series she wrote about the Butterfield Institute. I will be checking out those books.




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