RE Butler, $0.99
Fantasy Romance, 2016
Maybe I had been living under a rock, but I’m starting to come across more stories featuring reindeer dudes whose greatest dream in life to be part of the herd pulling the sleigh of an obese bearded goon with an unhealthy fixation of judging children’s behavior. Is that supposed to be sexy? It used to be that romance novels feature billionaires and more, and now we just want men content to be harnessed to a sleigh. Interesting times that we live in, hmm.
Is this where I bring up the claims that Santa’s reindeer are very likely castrated bulls?
There weren’t many females in North Pole City. The males outnumbered them seven to one. In order to be allowed to pursue a female to mate, a male had to prove his worth in a noble profession – for shifters like himself, Arian needed to find a permanent position, such as sleigh-work. For the last twelve years, he’d been standing on the sidelines, working his ass off but never actually being given a permanent position. It had been hell. His beasts wanted to be mated and start a family. Waiting because of an ancient Santa law had started to make Arian want to forget his shifting abilities and take a permanent position somewhere else, like with the toy builders.
Arian can shift into four forms: reindeer, artic fox, polar bear, and snowy owl, but due to the mating policies in his place, the reindeer thing plays the biggest role in his life. Thing is, Shifters are meant to be Santa’s sleigh slaves. It’s just the way things are up in the North Pole, and poor Arian is getting both desperate and horny because he is constantly denied his chance to pull a sleigh and hence pull a cow.
After lazily chasing some snowshoe rabbits and then chuckling to himself as they cursed him out in their strange bunny language from the safety of their dens, he headed back to the barn.
Wait, what? Am I supposed to be turned on by these antics more appropriate for a kid alpha male displays? Alright, see me applaud the author’s efforts to stomp out toxic masculinity from icky romance novels!
Anyway, Arian finally gets his dream gig… and then an accident happens and he crashes down to Earth. Oops. Fortunately, our human heroine Charli is waiting to save him and, of course, become his destined mate.
Tears blurred her vision. The reindeer was dead; she was sure of it. Dropping to her knees, she ignored the sting of the snow on her skin and laid the flashlight beside her.
“I’m sorry you… fell. I hope you have a safe journey to wherever reindeer go when they die.” She laid her hands on the creature’s chest and closed her eyes as the tears fell. She didn’t know why she felt so strongly, but she couldn’t control her emotions, and she didn’t fight them. As crazy as it seemed, she felt like she was meant to be here at this moment.
Alright, this is a children’s story, right? Right?
She couldn’t pull her hands away, even when the reindeer’s body shifted from beast to man and she was touching smooth flesh. The reindeer-man rolled onto his
back, and her hands skimmed over the taut flesh of his abs that were chiseled in a way that made every feminine urge inside her go woohoo.He groaned and his eyes opened, the brilliant blue orbs zeroing in on her and making her heart seize in her chest.
“Likli fanna,” he growled and then his eyes closed and he went limp in the snow.
Her hands flexed on his skin, and she blushed sharply, realizing how close she was to a very erect part of his anatomy.
Don’t stare, Charli, she chided herself.
He has an erection while barely remaining conscious? Okay, a kid wrote this story then. Am I right?
Charlie keeps crying in this story. She cries when Mr Likli Fanna recovers because then he’d leave her and she can’t bear the thought a man she barely knows doing that. She cries when Arian tells her that she is his. She cries when she is in trouble, and she cries when she feels safe. And when she can finally be with Arian in the land of Santa Claus, she suddenly remembers that she can’t be with him ever because she has a sister to take care of. I’m not sure how this crybaby girl-child can take of anyone, much less herself, but hey, maybe Mr Leaky Banana who gets erections when he is struggling to stay conscious is just the man she needs.
My brain tells me that Blitzen’s Fated Mate is an underdeveloped story with a standard mate-mate-mate story line, but I can’t get past the ghastly child-like nature of everything in this story horribly coexisting in the same context as throbbing erections. The whole thing is just disquieting, creepy even, and all that for a guy who is so happy to be finally part of a communal rat race that will tie him down to a routine of working for the obese Chairman and coming home to shag the wife for the rest of his life. What is this? Communist propaganda masquerading as erotica for thirteen-year old kids?
