Review: Lonely hunter
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 10, 2011
I've never read this author before, and after reading the sample, I just had to download it and continue the story. I had to find out what happens to the heroine Mari. I love a good romance, and this one, with the alien romance combined with capture theme, just got me.Ekkatt is a hunter, a harvester of human females. Earth women are kidnapped and brought to market where they are sold as either cheap labor, prostitutes, or food. Yes, that last one got me too. Humans are a delicacy to some aliens. To the aliens in Ekkatt's part of the universe, humans are no better or smarter than animals. In essence, Mari and the other captured females are livestock. To Ekkatt's people, who do not eat meat, Earthers are a subspecies and it is against the law to mate or couple with them. To them, Mari is just barely humanoid. She is something to be trapped and then sold to whatever fate awaits her.During their time together, before she is brought to market, Mari forces Ekkatt to see her as a worthwhile being, as a sentient being with thoughts and feelings, and Ekkatt grows to respect her and to disgust himself. Mari becomes more than a thing; she has a name, a language, a culture, all the things his people had been told Earthers do not possess. Humans are simply to be bought and sold. And I especially liked how the author related this sentiment to history: black slavery and the Holocaust. There is this deeper story of how we mistreat people, how we treat them less than human, all for greed or ignorance.To me this story was not overly erotic. There were a couple of sexy scenes, but that's not why to buy or read this story. It's a romance that makes you sit for a while after you've finished it, thinking about Mari and her tenacity, about her willingness to survive and to forgive. It left me thinking about Ekkatt who should really be Mari's enemy after all he has done to humans and yet she falls in love with him, and he with her. It made me think about how one person can decide to make a change against all he has known or thought to be true, how he can turn his world upside down in order to see it right for the first time in his life, and he does it all because of the love and courage of one woman.