I picked up a copy of A. Vrana’s Wicked Creation as an Amazon freebie, probably during a Stuff Your Kindle event. (Side note: Does anyone know if A. Vrana and A.J. Vrana are the same person?)

Doctor Leilani Kāne is no stranger to death. Earth became uninhabitable many decades ago and now the human race is living on Mars, fighting to keep from going extinct. In a last-ditch effort to find a new planet to call home, she is assigned to a station on one they call Cerebrius 207. However, this new planet is deadlier than any she’s ever seen before. In the four years she’s been there she’s lost hundreds of lives, but her superiors won’t listen to reason and give up on a planet that seems insistent on killing them. With dwindling resources and a sickness plaguing the humans from an indigenous plant, she has no choice but to continue to save the lives she can.

That is, until one fateful night …

When she goes to investigate a mysterious sound coming from the clinic, there’s nothing there except some footprints that don’t look human. Next thing she knows, she’s somewhere she doesn’t recognize and thrown into a confusing world of aliens she never knew existed. Faced with the idea of being true mates to not just one, but four of them, she has to decide whether to go back to her human life, or stay and learn to live among strangers with new rules she doesn’t ever plan to obey.

Look, I didn’t hate it. I appreciate a 35-year-old, non-virgin who likes sex, military educated, doctor, theoretically POC, curvy heroine (though neither are very well established and not at all incorporated). I liked the way the men/beasts were very caring, perfectly willing to say lovely, loving things. Plus, the subversion of the “mine” trope, where the men say they belong to her, not that she belongs to them, made me happy. But I definitely had issues with it.

Some of those issues are of the ‘this is problematic’ sort, such as the fact that there are basically no other women in the book. There is a single human friend who appears briefly (thus, I expect she’ll be the heroine in the next book); otherwise, the heroine is the only female in the entire 400+ page book. Or the whole noble-savage-y, Native American-like representation of the aliens. Hmmm, kinda icky.

Mostly they are of the annoying deus ex machina variety, where the heroine gains almost limitless power and then defeats aliens —bigger, more knowledgeable, better trained, and more powerfully socially positioned than herself—with ease. Suuuure, I believe that. Or the way she only encounters five males, each of whom falls for her instantly (one is dispatched). But then that whole plotline is dropped, and the reader never knows whether she magically meets her mates first or whether the humans really do entrap every male they encounter. It’s sloppy plotting. In fact, I think a lot of it is sloppy plotting. Very author-insert-y.

And yes, I do realize that the sex really is the point here. World-building is just the frame that the sex is hung on, and the plot is mere garnish. But that didn’t make it any less annoying, especially since the book is so unnecessarily long —far longer than what feels like the genre standard. All in all, I call this a middle-of-the-road read. I didn’t hate it, but I was kinda meh about it.

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