Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Close Liaisons (The Krinar Chronicles #1) I give this one out of five stars for the idiot heroine Mia, her alien stalker rapist Korum, and all kinds of inconsistent nonsense that drove my analytical mind crazy. Reading this was like watching a bad car wreck, I rubber necked my way through the whole thing thinking, “What a complete mess.” At times I wondered if this was satire, but at best I think its some kind of warped fan fiction. It’s a mix of Twilight, your least favorite Star Trek episode, and a smothering amount of bad erotica. Why I didn’t like this: 1) Stalkers, rape, and domestic abuse are not romantic. Korum did more than run an internet search to learn about Mia. He implanted a tracking device in her body. He followed her after class and forced her into a car. Mia got into the car and began crying because she feared for her life. She had sex with Korum, and cried through most of it, because she didn’t think she had a choice. Mia saw herself as Korum’s sex slave, and felt powerless. With the K’s in charge she felt there was no way for her to leave the relationship outside of him tiring of her or her own death. Over time Korum separated Mia from her friends, her education, her internship, and then prevented her from seeing her family. He dictated what clothes she wore, where she would study, and how she spent her time. It’s classic abuse and I think Mia’s eventual “love” for Korum is better defined as Stockholm syndrome. 2) The protagonist Mia is an idiot. She thought, did, and said all kinds of stupid things. For instance, after being kidnapped by her extraterrestrial stalker, she sits in his apartment contemplating how human’s and the alien Krinar or “K’s” are compatible sexually. Korum then asked Mia if he could make her something to eat. Shocked, Mia blurts out a question about the K’s eating food. She was seriously baffled, which made no sense at all. In the five years of K occupation, humans are able to figure out they can have sex with K’s, yet their staple diet remains unknown. In the first couple pages Mia has this long ridiculous internal narrative explaining how when the K’s took over earth, they dictated the foods humans were allowed to consume. The reader’s expected to believe humans willingly accepted the loss of bacon, yet tolerated learning nothing about their alien overlord’s diets. The logic gets worse as Korum takes Mia out on dates to all kinds of restaurants. Which means either Korum’s the very first K to ever set foot in a human restaurant, or Mia’s an idiot. 3) The sex scenes are bad. This is not something I usually even mention in reviews, but it needs to be called out here. I don’t enjoy reading rape scenes, they’re a disappointing choice for a number of reasons. The rape scenes here were no different. What elevated them from disappointing to disgraceful was the victim’s mindset. She didn’t define it as rape, and instead she went along with calling it “forced seduction.” This is twisted and wrong. Its disgusting to see material like this get five star ratings. What is wrong with you people? So if you read this be ready, there’s more than one “forced seduction”. There’s a lot more copulation material than is normal or necessary for a book this size. These also read pretty much the same, until Korum starts sucking Mia’s blood. I’m not joking, the 2,000 year old space alien is also some kind of vampire. I wonder if this characterization choice was made with the intent of capturing the vampire urban fantasy reader. The vampirism adds in all the usual vampire troupes. Including the ever popular: alpha male “your mine” declaration, drinking blood is a sacred sexual aphrodisiac, and the alien “vampire” lover has an overwhelmingly perfect physic and is described as a territorial predator. I also found the protagonist switching back and forth between anatomically correct terms for genitals and the matching slang terms jarring.