Customer Reviews

Trine Erotic

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This is something brand new to me and which caught me completely by
surprise--a biologically informed love story. One of those wonderful books
that takes useful, interesting intellectual ideas and makes them real and
palpable in people's lives. The book is filled with delightfully primal
themes voiced in a very modern idiom. It doesn't just tug at your emotions,
it tugs at them through your brain by weaving a nest of stories that
interlock and share meanings.

This is not biology in the old sense of simple "animal instincts" or even
just the recent sense of selfish genes and the mathematics of human
relationship games. It is also biology informed by our modern understanding
of how we create and transmit meaning through words. The roles of the "meme"
or fuzzy unit of culture, feature prominently as conceptual undercurrents
here. Then the author takes it way beyond being a unit of culture and
illustrates by her own masterful example how it is also an agent of human
transformation.

Many people talk about how human beings are linked by their stories, but in
Trine Erotic, the author demonstrates just how fundamental a mode of
communication the story can be. Her characters reveal the deep strategies
behind their feelings and behaviors, while trying to sort them out from their
excuses for their own behaviors.

Through her own storytelling, Alice Andrews seduces the reader into layer
after layer of change in their own understanding, all the while explaining
what she is doing. This is a relatively new and interesting form of
introspective art that both inspires and teaches.

Two problems ... we aren't used to art being quite so aware of its own role,
especially in scientific terms, and we usually aren't comfortable with women
consciously cutting through the haze of erotic games to see their own
relentless Darwinian logic. It's exciting and a bit disconcerting as well to
see female sexuality both revealed and unleashed in this light.

Andrews's female leads have the terrifying but exciting freedom we wish we had,
while still being immersed in misgivings of their own making, trying to sort
out complex webs of feeling and what it all means.

Not only did I find this book a delight, but I've put it on my list of books
to read when people want to learn about how themes of evolutionary biology
can be applied to real life.

... we don't talk about brownies or The Gap. Andrews explores human mating strategies from an intelligent female perspective. Sex and evolutionary psychology are the common thread in these compelling nested story lines -- our most primal urges filtered through a highly sophisticated cortex. Trine Erotic is one of a kind -- analytical, creative, seductive, profound... brilliant.

I loved Trine Erotic. If D.H. Lawrence had been a woman, if Virginia Woolf had lived today, they might have come up with something like this.

In Trine, Andrews explores the realm that is bounded by desire, more precisely the realm bounded by three desires: for love, for sex, for truth. It's like an erotic variation on the true, the beautiful, and the good. Love, sex, truth. Now there's a mythic landscape for you! And Andrews explores it compellingly. She is highly sensitive to nuance, highly sensitive to the shifting shades of truth and the shifting colors of desire. To top it off she writes deftly, with real artistry. A great read.

Alice Andrews's "Trine Erotic" is one of those books that is so delicious you lose interest in your everyday obsessions. Like a gourmet pastry, the flavors of the story are layered and woven so that the narrative is a blend of texture and sensations impossible to distinguish as units that were ever apart from one another. Above, below, and behind the actions and thoughts of the characters are the theories of evolution's imperative of survival, the psychological propensities and mechanisms unique to each sex. It is how these mechanisms direct the psychology of the individual and group that an ever-broadening array of academics, including Andrews, are discussing.

Being a Milton Erickson sort of girl, I am always grateful when an author can so thoroughly distract me with a story so that I hardly know I'm learning; and this "Trine Erotic" does skillfully, engagingly and magically. I highly recommend allowing one's self to be seduced into the hypnotic trance that this story (stories) -- by way of exploring the primal response of one sex to the other -- provides a reader.

If you have ever wondered if your sexual behavior was being directed by something other than your personal will, if you have ever wondered why you seemed to be locked into a redundant call and response with your partner, "Trine Erotic" might give you some answers as it addresses these questions with the sharp eye of the scientific researcher and the compassionate heart of the storyteller.

This alluring green book is a triumph in the art of literature -- inventive, seductive, compelling, and nearly impossible to put down at all. Rarely do I read with such dedication, but "Trine Erotic" required my undivided attention, and got it. True literary feats are too rare these days, and Alice Andrews reminds us all that literature can, indeed, still matter, surprise, and in places, astound.

I liked reading this book, as Ms. Andrews was brutally honest in sharing some of her thinking processes, or so it seemed! I related to quite a few points in the book, which scared me, as I thought some of my experiences with men or relationships were rare. Reading the book made me look at myself, & some of my choices, thoughts, etc. It was almost painful, but in a good way, like getting an infected tooth pulled! Ms. Andrews shows us that some of our impulsive or illogical behaviors are hard-wired instincts, rather than neurotic compulsions...whew! I am a single, middle-aged woman, so i don't know that someone of a different gender or age would have the same thoughts & feelings evoked by reading this. I must add I found certain parts amusing, like one part where a man comes up with an excuse (or a reason) for ending a relationship with the character that is so far fetched...yet probably true! I also found certain areas of the book to be explanatory in how females can relate to males, not just scientifically, but spiritually as well!