Several years ago, Sophie wrote the first three books of the Finding Home series, Odyssey, Sanctuary, and Refining Fire. (Check out my review of the series) Well, now she’s decided to bless us with Freedom, the sequel to the Finding Home series. This book takes place in between the last chapter and the epilogue of Refining Fire, so we get coverage of that gap in time. Sophie does really well at putting a timeline at the head of each chapter, so you know where in time you are. Basically, it’s all about Liz’s pregnancy and how Ryan freaks out. But really, that’s just the surface of the story. There’s a lot more to it than just that.
So, the war has ended, Jenny is the chairman of her province, Ryan is acting as her assistant, and Liz is working at the POW camp with the Edwal prisoners. She has the most in-person knowledge when it comes to being kept in a prison camp, so putting her in charge is a smart idea. But that’s not all that’s going on. We find out that Liz is pregnant right at the beginning of the book. She’s thrilled, Ryan’s thrilled, everyone is thrilled. And you’d think that the story would be great from here on out, but the story would be really boring if that was the case, wouldn’t it?
From the beginning, Ryan wants to wrap Liz up in cotton wool, lock her in a padded room, and make sure nothing ever happens to her at all. That includes doing things like, oh, breathing too hard in the outdoors. Ryan wants to make Liz quit her job, which is really important to her. He wants her to basically sit, eat all the healthy food ever, and do nothing but gestate, but that doesn’t work all that well for Liz.
Now, I get wanting to take care of your pregnant wife and sub, but Ryan goes overboard. He gives her an extraordinarily early bedtime, he makes her eat healthy food, and a lot of it, and he totally coddles her. In fact, with that coddling, their D/s relationship takes a backseat. In fact, it takes such a backseat that Ryan only tries to punish her a couple of times, and stops almost immediately when it happens. So much of a backseat, that she stops calling him Master, and all of their protocols go out the window. And everything starts to crack and splinter.
Now, like I said, this is basically about Liz’s pregnancy and Ryan freaking out about that, but it’s actually about a lot more. Liz and Ryan both spend a lot of time thinking about who they are in their relationship and out of it. You have to remember that they have literally never known each other outside of the M/s dynamic. Ryan was one of the slave trainers when Liz was brought onto the estate as a slave. He has always been in a position of authority over her. Liz is trying to figure out if she is actually submissive or if it is something that has been conditioned into her and to figure out her identity.
Ryan is basically doing the same thing, but on the Domly side. His biggest issue is that as the Dom, he’s supposed to appear like he always knows what is going on and that he has everything under control, and right now, almost nothing is under his control, which can be a huge issue.
I didn’t realize that Freedom was the book I needed until I read it and discovered it was. I was pretty happy with the series the way that it was, and Freedom really just deepens my enjoyment of the series, because it just gives us more about Liz and Ryan. Most of the conflict in the book is about their relationship, but there is enough stuff going on outside of their relationship that we were able to get a break, catch our breath, and then go back into Liz and Ryan’s story.
If you like kinky, dark, capture sagas, check out all the Finding Home books. Sophie did a fanfuckingtastic job on the series, and I really can’t go enough into the books in just one blog post. So, check ’em out, and happy reading!
In Between the Pages 