I was intrigued by the writing, just didn’t like how we handled this premise.

This was the premise in a nutshell: our farm-owning human lady on an alien planet wanted to buy a farm labour slave but all she could afford was an alien male concubine slave, with comedic results.

That premise alone had a lot of 😬 potential for yikes . And, though the writing was good and I was rooting for this couple, where we went with this premise let me down.

I don’t automatically discount sci-fi and fantasy books with these themes—I think they’re a great way to critique slavery, sex trafficking, and gender-based inequality, even when the tone of the book is lighthearted or silly. But ultimately, his status and training as a sex slave was portrayed as more ‘hot’ than evil (even though there was some on-page critique of it, to be fair) and that took me out of the story.

Maybe this author’s other series is more my thing.