Review: but their sudden appearance did not bring out the best in people
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 7, 2014
The book is set four years after representatives from the Alliance, a multi-world group of aliens, came to Earth in peaceful response to Earths exploration of space. They came in peace, but their sudden appearance did not bring out the best in people. It caused chaos. Fear and panic led to violence and devastation. The governments of the world lost control of its citizens and the cities have turned to a fend-for-yourself mentality that gives the advantage to criminals. The Trivator warriors were called in to offer humanitarian aid and to try to re-establish order.Jesse is a young woman with two younger sisters to care for. The siblings have lost their home and their parents and live in the rubble avoiding both the Trivators and the other humans. Both are dangerous, but Jesse doesn’t hate them. She just doesn’t know who to trust. She’s on the way back from searching for food, when her path crosses with a group of humans who’ve captured a Trivator and plan to kill him. When a slim opportunity comes to help him escape, she sets him free and manages to escape herself before he can stop her. It turns out that the alien, Hunter, was not in as much trouble as she thought. He’d let himself be captured and his cohorts were closing in on the building. Regardless, Hunter is impressed by her bravery and wants to aid her. He and his friends track her back to the shelter where she and her sisters were hiding only to find her gravely injured and one of her sisters ill.  In order to get her the medical attention she needs, the Trivators take them back to their base and Hunter claims Jesse as his amate and her sisters as her family.  From there, things only get better and worse for all of them. The girls like Hunter and his friends but aren’t so easily convinced to accept Hunter’s claim. These girls are clever and tough and the Trivators aren’t the only ones coming to the rescue through the course of the story.I really enjoyed seeing the girls challenge the warriors. They warriors were tough and powerful but kind and they respected the girls’ ingenuity and bravery. For me, respect is a super-uber-plus in any romance. There was plenty of depth and dimension to all of the characters and the world seemed interesting and consistent. There wasn’t a lot of serious, book-long conflict between the romantic couple. While Jesse resisted Hunter’s decision to claim her and to take her and her sisters back to his home world, she did so more out of fear of the unknown and concern for her sisters. And once she learned she could trust Hunter, a great deal of the conflict came from action and danger due to hunter being a warrior and from the girls adjusting or clashing with their new circumstances. I don’t want to spoil the plot, just saying this book is more drama than angst. It worked well for the story and for me as a reader. I loved both Hunter and Jesse. They seemed like two great characters that deserved happiness. Their relationship had equal amounts of sexiness and caring and I liked seeing how important family was for both of them and how important they came to be for each other.