In this world, people can submit a blood sample to a temple of matchmakers and somehow they determine if you have a perfect fated match. So this was an interesting beginning to this book, we have our ice giant main male character of King Aldrig who is coming to the temple to be joined with human Lucy. Aldrig is determined to have a queen who will stay by his side and give him heirs, this is not the way of the ice giant females and he has had issues with keeping a woman in the past, so he decides to try his luck with getting a human wife. Lucy is in the situation because she needs to help herself and send money to her poor family so that they can eat and survive.

I did feel like our main two characters had some sort of instant connection and their initial wedding ceremony and first contact seemed sweet/off to a promising start. However immediately after the wedding ceremony, Aldrig requires an immediate consummation that is a witnessed by some of his friends that he brought along, so they immediately have to jump into bed together. There is a extreme size difference between these two characters, and though they use some potentially magic oil and he makes it good for her, it was not something I particularly cared to read... (bulging stomach full of cum...) At the end of this sex scene is when the characters can now leave the temple and go to his home base, and this is about 50% of the way through the book!

The problem is that the second half of the book really just took a hard left turn, Aldrig suddenly disappears because he is busy running the country or passing a bill or something and he basically abandoned Lucy. We don't get to see any of his point of view during this part, we are just stewing with Lucy in her feelings of abandonment and rejection. We have more communication and conversation on page with her maid/pa than we do between husband and wife. There is a point of conflict involving Aldrig's brother trying to assault / rape Lucy and this didn't really make a ton of sense to me, I feel like he could have just lied about that to cause problems with his brother and throw Lucy's claim to the throne into question?

Overall the first half of this book is a wedding and a very long sex scene, the second half of this book is abandonment by the main male character then attempted rape and then basically another sex scene where our main characters get back together and are happy again, followed with a happily ever after epilogue... That plus the size difference really made it so that I couldn't enjoy this novella very much. I feel like most of the other reviews I read were similar to this one and saw also other people complaining that there was not enough emotional or romantic development.

This is a pretty standard run of the mill alien romance, a bit fun but mostly derivative and is not standing out in my memory whatsoever.

Interesting setup/ start to the story, the main female character Niki is the captain of a military space squad of all women who are going to this planet to negotiate with the locals, they are participating in what they believe to be a 'welcome' ceremony and turns out that oops! it's a marriage ceremony and now they are married to these aliens. It seems pretty obvious to me that this was not simply a welcome ceremony, but I'm okay with the little bit of a wild setup for a romance. I thought it was interesting that Earth had basically tricked these women into going on this mission by saying it's amazing to have an all-female group (but they higher ups knew they were sending brides). That provided an element of tension and a source of conflict for Niki's loyalties, but I would love to hope that maybe in some far distance space traveling future there would be less misogyny bullshit?

I did appreciate that there was not that many chapters before a translator came into play and that the main characters were able to communicate for most of the book. I also appreciated that Niki was a strong and determined captain who was attempting to focus on getting to her fellow comrades and friends, and I liked that later she kept her head when in a tough spot and away from Draz and she was able to manipulate the surroundings/aliens to her benefit. I think this book somewhat suffered a little bit from the amount of external conflict outside of the romantic pairing, Not only was there local conflict with separatists and multiple issues between tribes of people, but also there were other aliens who had come from other planets involved, as well as the negotiations that Earth and our main female characters are trying to do... I just didn't 100% follow who all of the side characters were or what their motives were. At one point I created a post where I was complaining that this book is just the same as so many others, and bemoaning the fact that I want a nice unique alien romance. I also made comments about how the writing felt a little bit choppy and the descriptions were odd or inconsistent.

Overall I don't remember how this book ends, I felt that the romance was too rushed despite the fact that so much of this book is literally just them traipsing through the jungle together or hiding in a cave, and overall this story is just very derivative and not memorable. After reading some other reviews I saw one that pointed out very rightly how the alien males conveniently tricked the women into marrying them, Draz decided to essentially prolong the danger by staying in the jungle instead of directly taking Niki to safety and comfort, and then he left her behind to go search for food but then was mad at her when she got hurt... I also saw a lot of complaints that Draz was just too sweet or soft, but I didn't feel like that was a huge issue. I also saw many complaints that Niki's characterization turns out to be a little bit too wimpy or that her character was insecure and that people didn't like her.