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Alien Abduction for Beginners by Skye MacKinnon
1.0
Extra star added because I did enjoy Bridget Bordeaux’s narration as Trish, while I wasn’t the biggest fan of her masculine voices, I did like how she voiced her character’s confusion. (Honestly, her POV chapters, in both narration and writing, were the highlights of this novella.) To be honest, she’s kind of the only reason I picked this up, I have “A Sky Of Emerald Stars” on my audio TBR (she voices Sadie’s POV!) but wanted to hear what she narrated like beforehand and this was the most bizarre choice I saw on her catalogue.

Not a big fan of this. I saw someone in the reviews be all shocked about the alien cum
but the only abnormal thing it does is stain skin like a permanent marker. Nothing special there, it’s just a little silly.
The POVs of the aliens were more painful to read than amusing, especially with the theatrical, often tonally inappropriate narration done for them. I’m also bummed we didn’t get more of Trish’s POV, not just for the preferences listed in the first paragraph, but also because I felt it objectified her more. (The aliens’ lack of knowledge about women, while probably laughed at by the narrative, makes a lot of their conversations about Trish and sex feel robotic and locker room-adjacent. It was a little uncomfortable, to say the least.) Xil’s surface-level feminism also made me roll my eyes, it took a little too long for that to be made fun of.

The writing style was also very janky, from a human POV being in very little of the novel. Straightforward, but not in a clinical way? It was just awkward? I know that was intentional, I still think it took away practically all the appeal of the sex scenes.  

Other critiques: 
  1. Maybe it’s because of other works I’ve read about alien characters (that are… on the depths of Ao3, I admit), but this was not nearly as bizarre as the plot made it seem. The story seems to think it’s much freakier than it actually is— case in point: Trish’s repeated internal monologue of “I was probed by aliens, and liked it!” and other variations. 
  2. Wasn’t Trish first described as having dark skin??? With some kind of braid pattern??? Her cover image being a whole white woman REALLY threw me off, what even constitutes as dark lmao, but also she would have been ABYSMAL rep so idc
  3. How can the aliens be described as genetically similar to humans, but not be made up of water or even know what it is? Surely that would provide a couple issues??? 
  4. (Leaving this without a spoiler warning because it’s in the novella titles, I realize.) Not intending on reading the other books in this series, but the change in course difficulty (from beginner to advanced) is such a sudden jump?? Should I even be thinking about logic for a book like this, though?

But I will say that the author sounded nice in her note at the end. It crushed me a bit to leave such a low rating, but I genuinely can’t find anything redeemable. My mistake, perhaps, for venturing too far out of my comfort zone. 
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