AUTHOR: Linda Mooney
PUBLISHER: Whiskey Creek Press Torrid
LENGTH: Novel (roughly 49k)
GENRE: Sci-fi erotic romance
COST: $5.99
Waitress Hannah Pitt has had bad luck with men. From an abused father, straight into the arms of an abusive boyfriend, she yearns for someone to treat her with honor and respect. Someone just like her regular breakfast customer, Jeb. When her boyfriend Carl goes too far, Jeb takes matters into his own hands and spirits her away, protecting her from any more harm. Already half in love with him, she doesn’t expect him to return her feelings. It’s just too bad Jeb’s not human. Or that he’s on the run himself from the alien species determined to return him to slavery.
I have a confession. If I had known from the beginning that the heroine in this story was a woman in an abusive relationship, and that the crux of 2/3’s of the book would be her hiding out from her abusive boyfriend while getting taken care of by the hero, I never would have bought it. But there’s absolutely no indication of the heroine’s true situation from the blurb on Whiskey Creek’s website, and the excerpt is the prologue where Jeb’s spacecraft crashlands on Earth. I don’t have anything against these kinds of heroines, but more often than not, they’re just used as devices for the hero to prove how wonderful he is, crying all the time and never showing any backbone. Sadly, this book falls into the same paradigm.
Hannah is frail and weepy for much of the book, so many of the interactions are based on that mindset. It’s no wonder that she falls in love with Jeb; he’s the first person to ever treat her like a human being. Jeb, for his part, does the best he can, but he’s just not interesting enough to compensate for Hannah for me.
Some of the word choices worked against the story’s favor, as well. Jeb is alien, so it makes sense that he’d have different terminology. But choosing to call his penis a “manpipe” was an unfortunate selection. I laughed every time I saw the word and, as a result, couldn’t invest in any of the romantic scenes. Body parts have perfectly good names, and I never understand what people have against using them. It’s a body part. I can appreciate using coarse terminology can be hard for some people, but I don’t feel – and have never felt – that applying such logic to medically accepted terms for your body makes sense. It instills a sense of shame in your body, and do we really need that on top of all the other stuff in the world today?
The book marks the first in a series about Jeb’s alien race, but I have to say, I probably won’t bother with future stories. The author’s style didn’t engage me enough to get past my problems with the story, and I don’t care enough about the other aliens to bother risking it again. Hopefully Hannah and Jeb will have a nice, angst-free future. I’d hate to see her crying again.
| Readability | 5/10 – Reasonably error-free, but too many words that just completely pulled me out |
| Heroine | 3/10 – I’m just really not into the abused woman/victim who cries all the time |
| Hero | 5/10 – All right enough, if a bit boring |
| Entertainment value | 4/10 – Not my cup of tea, especially with the sci-fi stuff just as window dressing |
| World building | 7/10 – Jeb’s world is mildly interesting and unique enough to merit some points here |
| TOTAL: | 24/50 |
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