Most helpful customer reviews
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1.0 out of 5 stars
disappointed, May 5 2004
I was interested in reading this book because I have always found the female foot to be the most sexually appealing part of the body. Now I am not sure if I an a "fetishist" or a "partialist". That discussion is beyond the scope of this review. From someone who does like women's feet, I was very disappointed. From a literary standpoint, I felt the book had a very weak plot and the characters were disappointing. It was not great writing by any means and it left me bored. From a personal standpoint, I was disappointed in the main character. I like feet but I am no where near that perverted. Stealing women's shoes and sneaking around taking pictures is....disturbing. Very stereotypical character. It is akin to using a black man named Rastus in an Afro-American novel. Kind of insulting to black people. In the same vein, the main character in this book is insulting to me.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Utterly fascinating, Sep 19 2003
As with every good book, from the moment we begin reading Footsucker, we are drawn into a completely unique world, in this case, the world of the foot and shoe fetishist. And Geoff Nicholson's prose is so addictively readable that I simply could not put the book down until I was finished. When I was done, though, I was left with the feeling of wanting more, both in the good and the bad sense. The character of Catherine, the woman with the perfect feet with whom the protagonist falls in love, was left mysteriously vague, perhaps on purpose, but I wished there had been more depth to her. And in retrospect, the plot of the book itself seemed but a flimsy device upon which to hang the protagonist's consuming obsessions. Still, these drawbacks were more than compensated by the fascinating character of the protagonist himself, and by the author's lovingly detailed portrayal of the mind of this particular foot and shoe fetishist. And even if you don't share the protagonist's obsessions, you will find reading Footsucker a very erotic experience, though it would be doing a disservice to the novel to label it an erotic book. For, among other things, this book is a study of fetishism in its broadest sense: we are all fetishists by nature, and all of our actions are predicated upon the particular fetishes to which we are subject.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Should have been called Shoelover, Feb 21 2003
I finished this book after many trips to the library on my lunch break because I was too embarrassed to check it out and have people I know see me with it. Despite a lot of lip service that the protaganist pays to being a "foot and shoe fetishist" and not being interested in the shoes without the feet, his actions make it clear that it is the shoes that are the focus of his admiration, and the feet are not much more than a means to display the shoes he finds so compelling. I mean, he has an entire collection of shoes, he steals shoes from women who leave them in public.What plot there is in the book is flat, very poorly developed, and all too conveniently wrapped up. While there is much exploration of the main character and his interests and motiviations, there is little or no depth to any of the other characters in the book, especially Catherine, whose feet the protaganist is smitten with. However, that may be intentional by the author because it is her feet, and nothing else about her that so transfixes the protagonist (I don't think I ever caught his name). Also, there is a lot of historical garbage about feet and fetishes that is superfluous, and often simply disgusting. There is a very small twist at the end that I thought was fairly interesting, but it didn't make up for the near complete lack of any attention to plot development. All in all, if you have a shoe fetish, you'll probably find this book very compelling just because of the fetish aspect. If you have a foot fetish, you'll probably find it interesting for the same reason, although it's probably not exactly what you might expect. For anyone else, you'll probably just think the whole thing is strange.
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