ALIEN CHRISTMAS ROMANCE
I’m going to start with a warning: I gave this book 4 stars on Goodreads. I know for a lot of reviewers, that’s a good thing, but I’m not a book reviewer. I only post recommendations, and I only have time in my life to write whole posts on a handful books. It’s rare for me to put this effort into a 4 star. But I both rated it 4 stars and put this effort in for good reason:
Skip the first chapter.
You skip the first chapter, and it’s 5 stars.
In the first chapter, you meet Shea and her daughter, Lila. They’re in Space City visiting her sister Hazel, who has her own book in the Starr Huntress series (which I haven’t read and didn’t need for this), who is pregnant with her alien partner, an Ezak-X who, like all of his kind, was tortured by his creators. Shea is single, and Lila’s father is only kind of in the picture and totally a douche. By the end of the scene, she’s seriously considering moving to Space City.
It’s a really boring first chapter. If there’d also been typos or other evidence that the book wasn’t well written and edited, I would have dropped it. I’m really glad I didn’t, and that’s why I’m telling you to read it. You can store that little summary I just wrote in your brain for getting through the second chapter, or you can forget it all and just read the book. All of this is obvious enough.
And you can start with the alien next door, suffering from the Why Is My Dick Doing This trope.
I haven’t mentioned this before–because I’m pretty new at this blogging thing and I have no idea what I’m doing–but the Why Is My Dick Doing This trope is one of my favorites, along with the One Bed trope and the Home For The Holidays trope, all of which get their time to shine in Gift Of The Beast. None of them are really the focal point of the story, and One Bed goes disastrously wrong, but I’m all for maligned tropes. I’ve never written a failed One Bed, so I’m glad Sonia Nova is tipping the scale slightly for me.
OMG, also? The dude is totally broken. Tortured victim. Uncomfortably with talking. I wish there’d been an eensy bit more development with that, a Come To Jesus instead of gradual increase in comfort, but that’s just personal preference.
Yep, as of writing this post on December 8th, 2020, this is in Kindle Unlimited. It’s a fairly short read. It’s Christmas and it’s alien and if that’s your jam, check it out.
He doesn’t talk much and he’s a tortured soul, so that emo haircut is fair.
C. A. Balkin 