Tag Archives: Dangerous Words Publishing

entered in the alien bride lottery

Book Review: Entered in the Alien Bride Lottery, by Margo Bond Collins

I picked up a compilation of the first three books and a bonus short story in Margo Bond CollinsKhanavai Warrior Bride Games series as an Amazon freebie. Here I’m only reviewing the first one, Entered in the Alien Bride Lottery, and the Christmas short Christmas for the Alien Bride Lottery. I ended up reading this now because the short story qualified for my 2022 Winter Reading Challenge.


There are a million ways to end up in the Alien Bride Lottery. But it takes only one.

Every unmarried female human over the age of 21 gets entered once a year. You can also accept extra entries for legal infractions—instead of paying a parking fine, for example, you can request an extra entry. Lots of women do that. I mean, why not? The chances are astronomical that your name will get chosen to be one of the hundred or so women who get shipped off to space every year.

And even if your name is drawn, the odds are slim that you’ll match up with an alien who’s looking for a mate.

Most of the lottery-drawn women come back to Earth every year and resume their lives as if nothing changed.

But some don’t.

And no matter what, getting drawn in the Lottery means you have to compete in the Bride Games.

Guess that’s where I’m heading now.

I only hope I can avoid catching the eye of one of the giant, rainbow-hued brutes whose mission is to protect Earth—and who can claim me as a mate.

All because I was Entered in the Alien Bride Lottery…

my reviewI read this as part of The Alien Bride Lottery Volume 1: The Khanavai Warriors Alien Bride Games Books 1-3. However, I do not think I’ll read any more than this first story.

I generally like the Mars Needs Women trope in a cheesy sci-fi sort of way. And I’ve read Margo Bond Collins’ books before. They’re usually fluffy, silly fun; nothing deep but enjoyable. And this book was competently written. However, I did not like it. Partly because I didn’t like what Collins did with the story and partly because there wasn’t enough development that I could come to accept what Collins did with the story.

Here’s the thing. It’s not at all uncommon that the women in a Mars Needs Women trope get taken from their life on Earth to live among the aliens. That’s kind of the whole shtick. And some authors pull it off well enough that it isn’t quite as rage-inducing as it can be. And some authors make a hash of it, such that you can’t ever come around to forgiving the alien for what they did to her. And some, like Collins here, do something even worse, in my opinion. They make their female character decide they want to give it all up to go pop out babies for their alien husbands. And, in order for this to be worth a plot, the woman has to have something to be giving up. it doesn’t work if she has no life to speak of.

And this is what I didn’t and don’t like. Collins gives us a woman who is in university, has goals, dreams, and a life plan. And then she very quickly decides to give it all up to run off and play broodmare to an alien. But the underlying message is the same old patriarchal claptrap women are always subtly fed. Those goals of education and a meaningful career aren’t really women’s true purpose, being a wife and mother is her proper role. And this is reinforced in these stories by how quickly the female characters see the the error of their ways, see how much better life would be as a wife and mother instead educated or with a career and course correct, by giving up their own hard-earned lives to play second fiddle to a man.

No matter how you restructure the plot in various books, this is the moral of a lot of romance stories, and it crops up frequently in the Mars Needs Woman trope. The trick for the author is to make it not so blatant that women (like myself) who value education and a career don’t feel slapped in the face for our “wrong choices.” *Insert eye-roll.* Collins failed in this.

[Spoiler ahead] She tried, I’ll give her that. The H is lovely and wanted to find a way for the h to accomplish her goals. And they did find a way for her to finish her degree as a distance student, which is more than some authors offer their female characters. But what good would that really be on an alien planet? And in the end, it doesn’t negate the fact that we were given a female character who has to choose between the educational goals she set for herself and has worked entered in the alien bride lottery photohard for and a man. Then, without a second thought, tossed her own goals aside to take up the mantle of support to a male. (The finishing of the degree did not come up until after she’d made this choice.)

*Yawn.* Yawn because it’s been written a million times before in support of patriarchal norms, and yawn because it required exactly zero creativity. Collins seems to have made exactly zero effort to give us anything new and interesting.

So, I think I’m done with this series.

***

I also read the short story Christmas for the Alien Bride Lottery. (It was included as a bonus with the compilation). It was barely anything at all. Another girls gets called up for the lottery, immediately decides she likes the look of one particular alien (who has also decided she’s his mate), they have a brief holiday experience, and a fairly bland sexual encounter and wham, bam, thank you ma’am, and live happily ever after. I wasn’t impressed. But I do think even this condensed version was was less rage-inducing that book one of the series. I felt like this heroine didn’t have a lot going on earth-side, looked at her options, and decided going with the alien worked for her. She didn’t throw away all her plans and hard work for it though. Plus, she was the initiator for a lot of the story.


Other Reviews:

http://angelsguiltypleasures.com/2022/04/thrifty-thursday-review-entered-in-the-alien-bride-lottery-khanavai-warrior-bride-games-1-by-margo-bond-collins/

 

 

tiny and fierce

Review of Tiny and Fierce, by Margo Bond Collins & Eli Constant

I Picked up a copy of  Tiny and Fierce, by Margo Bond Collins and Eli Constant through Booksprout.

Description from Goodreads:

In a galaxy where humans are considered the least of all races, she’ll build a crew that adores her strength and style.

When Tommelise took over her family’s deep-space salvage company, she never expected to stumble through a wormhole into a whole other galaxy full of strange alien races ruled by a cruel empress.

She learns she’s not the first human to wind up there—but all the others were captured and sold as slaves. She’ll have to fight to stay alive.

She thought all she wanted was to find a way home. But then she fell in love—three times over—and learned that together, her men would fight three times as fiercely.

Now, to keep her loves alive, she’ll have to free an entire system.

Review:

Utterly and completely bonkers, but kinda sweet too. I appreciate that, of the three men in the harem, only one is truly humanoid. The others, walk up-right (most of the time) but have alien anatomies that make for interesting reading and one eye-opening sex scene (the only one in the book and it’s mild). The plot is pretty ludicrous and things happy pretty helter-skelter. (I mean Lise manages to trip and fall through TWO uncharted wormholes in occupied space, for example!) But it’s still enjoyable all the same.

I didn’t like that the women the crew rescued were continuously referred to as the “slave women,” “slave stock,” “slaves,” etc. Emphasizing their status as former slaves over that of autonomous women. There was only one group of women. “The women” would have sufficed and made them feel like actual individuals and less like commodities, serving the theme of the book better I think.

All in all, however, I thought it a pretty piece of fluff and don’t consider the time I spent reading it wasted.