This was a pleasant surprise! It was all about the classic (at least, I’m calling it a classic) premise: an alien society with no more lady aliens, invades earth to find their fated human mates.

There was a lot to love in here:
✨ the world building was next level (TW for occupation tho)
✨ the plots and characters were gritty and complicated
✨ there was a science-y twist to the fated mates thing that felt new

I especially liked how mistakes and morally grey behaviour were written. First, because it had less of a cartoonish evil vibe, and more of a Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” vibe—which is not only ontologically onto something, but more interesting story-wise. And second, I appreciated how questionable stuff, particularly between our MCs, was written as ‘bad’ not as ‘kinda hot’—which is really at the crux of how down I am for bad behaviour in my romance books.

So why not five stars?

For the first book, just one thing kept it from being perfect. You know Book III of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates describes (probably facetiously) his ideal society: where children are taken from their parents at birth, raised communally, and and divided into different job-based social strata in early childhood?

This lady-less alien society raised their boy aliens like that. And the humans were like, “heck no, kids should be raised in loving families.” Which was great. But sometimes a hint of “a child needs a mother” crept in. And rather than blaming Plato, we were blaming the lack of parents-with-vaginas for their alien social structure, which was meh.