Review: Where is the romance?
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 17, 2013
Seeing the pilots fighting, Rask assumes they are a threat and kills them. He  has Grace backed up against a tree, but can't understand how defenseless these creatures seem to be.  So he checks her out for weapons, him thinking her boobs were bombs was kind of cute. The rest of the search reminded me of a customs or a prison scenario. Hmm, if she had something stashed away wouldn't she have used it by now?  So Rask has never seen a female, he is clueless when it comes to sex. Even to the degree he has no idea about female anatomy or what a female looks like! Excuse me, he had a mother. He remembers her, but can't remember what a female looks like? So it has been four hundred years since he has seen one, may be I can forgive that.But the bids and the bee's? What kid hasn't asked the "Where do we come from?" question at some stage. He was brought up by his father who rationalized that as all the females on their world had died out, why would he need to know. What about curiosity or simple education. After realising what he has, he takes Grace back to his base and they get straight into updating his lack of knowledgable about sex.  Sure there are lots of funky pheromones flying around encouraging these two, but Grace seems to decide it's the best chance for her survival to let sex happen. Gosh romantic. Of course these two stumbling their way through alien sex, end up mated. Their life force joined for the rest of their days.The problem with characters having sex before forming any emotional attachment is that it is just sex. Where is the romance? It can be much harder for an author to add it in after the physical stuff. That often means the physical stuff has less depth. I suppose that why I didn't really care about either of these characters that much. Rask seemed sweet if not clueless and Grace was along for the ride. There was a lot of action in the second half but it all felt a bit rushed to introduce new characters.  Opps, I might be getting a little negative here what did I like?The concept was great, aliens that produce their own armour. interesting. First contact with these aliens sets up lot of different possibilities. Not having any females left of their own race means earth females are a valuable commodity. They want to interact and form relationships. The world building was good you really got a great sense of the planet and the differences in the Castian warriors to humans. This wasn't a badly written book I just felt there could have been a bit more romance along with the action.