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Reviews From This Past Week
Viridios By L. A. Holloway
Release Date: June 28, 2022
Content Notes
Size difference
STEM FMC
WOC FMC
Sexy Groot MMC
Primitive Planet
Viridios is a brief but highly creative sci-fi read by L. A. Holloway that made me wonder if us readers should beexpanding to plants in our monster romance diet. Ents, as it turns out, can be quite sexy.
Holloway went in a creative and inspiring path for the alien creative MMC. I appreciated that she opened up a path to expand this story into a series possibly. The plot does not merely ask what it would be like to fall for a tree man after all. It asks what it would be like to fall for a god. The combination was cool to explore.
If there was an aspect of this story I would have liked to have adjusted, it would have been the pacing of the FMC and MMC falling for each other. Their emotional journey felt almost too straightforward for their circumstances. I would have gladly taken some more pages from Holloway if I could have gotten some more romantic stumbling or anxiety.
I Married a Dryad by Regine Abel
Release Date: March 22, 2023
Content Notes
Instalove
Bounty Hunter MMC
Hacker FMC
Psychic plant powers
Kidnapping
Person trafficking
Drug trafficking
I Married a Dryad is a not-technically-but-still included installment of Regine Abel’s Prime Mating Agency that does a good job showing off Abel’s world-building skills. It also seems to be their experimenting where the PMA series goes from here. Interesting!
First! I will confess that I may never stop reading Abel’s stuff, especially the PMA series. Abel combines serious world building and fluffy plots that I just need in my reading diet.
This all being said…I have personally noticed I like Abel’s main characters when they have more tension, more apprehension, or more anxiety. This story needed a high stakes abduction case with a rescue mission because the main couple was not going to carry the story by themselves. They themselves were not going to ignite the conflict a good story requires, but they did a good job leading us to the end.
But were they too perfect?
Because they were so perfect together they could just explore the world of the Edocit world. This exploration could just be that, an exploration. That seems to have created a plot imbalance that I suspect sparked some reviewers towards their complaints about “infodumping”.
In short, the story doesn’t get really interesting until partway through.
So I can empathize with readers’ impatience with parts of the book. I personally suspect Abel is trying something new for the PMA series with this book. So I will be curious where she goes from here!
Currently Reading
To Be Read
Housekeeping
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