Nikki's Secret by TN Tarrant

Very rarely would I stop reading a novel when I was over 80% finished, but I did so in this case.  Just couldn't take any more, Although "Nikki's Secret" by TN Tarrant held the promise of being a winner based on the described story line and also being a relatively lengthy tale with a titillating cover, it failed to deliver miserably. The plot concerns a transgender woman living in stealth who happens to be a high school teacher. Naturally, her background is discovered and the novel is about that aspect of her life. That's the one redeeming part I found. What I couldn't stomach was all the gratuitous and almost arbitrarily placed sex.

Our teacher heroine, Nikki, just happens to be married to two, yes TWO men! The "steamy" scenes occur all too frequently and seem to come out of nowhere, serving as mere filler to prolong the agony of this book and redirect it away from the plot. It feels as though there are two books going at once, intertwined and not belonging together. In "Nikki," you also have a spate of extremely prejudiced, over-the-top characters...police, parents and others, who are not just bigots, almost all of them insist on calling our ostensibly very feminine protagonist "Mr." and referring to her as a man. This comes across as an almost laughable parody of the prejudicial behavior of society. There is such a thing as discrimination, but this stuff is so over-the-top it borders on ridiculous. Then again, "ridiculous" is the watchword for this novel.

Reviewed by Samuel