Tamsin Baker, $2.99, ISBN 979-8201581695
Sci-fi Romance, 2022

Azalea knows that she will die today, on her 18th birthday. 

You see, humans in her world are bred for one purpose: to satiate the Monster Appetites of the creatures that truly rule the land.

She will be auctioned off to the highest bidder, and then she’d presumably be cooked and eaten in order to make some vore communities out there very happy.

My gaze skated across the sharp teeth and daggers hanging from the belts of the men who looked like hunters.

“Who do you think will buy me, Mother?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of interest, but I do hope you go to one of the Tireetians. They care for their humans before they consume them. You will be worshipped, as you deserve.”

My gaze fell on a monster of dark skin and flashing red eyes. I gasped as desire filled my belly. He was hideous, but in a way that made me want to reach out and touch him.

Yes, the vore communities will love this one. Ooh, to be devoured by a sexy ugly thing! 

Sadly, this is not a love story to Papa Nurgle, nor is it a vore story. In other settings, the trio of guys that take Azalea in would be comparable with tieflings, what with them having horns and all, but Drax, Hosner, and Tamee all felt the mating call with her, so this love sadly won’t end up in a cooking pot. 

Oh don’t worry, the three guys are all princes of their planets, so it’s not like our heroine would be slaving away at some mining colony, cooking and cleaning barefoot and pregnant until the three sweaty husbands come home and demand some putting out fun ASAP. 

Azalea is so grateful that she’d be flown off to some place where she’d be treated more like a princess than a slab of beef in the larder—oh, the author has broken the hearts of the vore folks—and now all that is left is the banging. 

Okay, while I am glad that our heroine is saved from the cooking pot by the convenient mating call plot device, the same plot device also sadly is used by the author to skip everything else about the story.

Why are these people suddenly all in love? It’s the mating call, of course.

Are there going to be any conflicts in this relationship, like jealousy? Nonsense, the mating call makes everything perfect!

How about inter-species cultural differences? Clearly, the mating call will make everything right.

Are humans even compatible with whatever these aliens are when it comes to popping out babies? Otherwise, it won’t make sense for all three princes to be plugged into a woman that won’t provide any heirs, surely. Well, the mating bond will likely force some spawn to pop out, surely!

The three princes are more like one man-child’s brain split into three bodies.

Not as long as I had breath in my body, she wouldn’t.

“We want her to be our queen, Hosner,” Tamee reminded me.

When I shrugged, Drax punched me in the shoulder. “Brother, we can’t treat her like a whore. We must woo her, seduce her, make her love us.”

Also, I’m not convinced that Azalea is in love as much as… well, she’s grateful, yes, but come on. She is sold as a slave to Tweedledrax, Tweedlehosner, and Tweedletamee so it’s not like she has any other recourse other than to put out and hope these men are vegans. “Love” here feels like some band-aid with a heart image on it slapped onto the story just to make the premise seem romantic to people that aren’t scrutinizing it too closely.

Okay, how about the sex scenes? Surely that would make this thing worth a look, right?

Sadly, these scenes are more of a “he did this, she moaned that” kind of thing that may work in a visual medium, but for a written work, I feel that more description is needed to make these scenes more like a hot, sexy, savage hump and less of an IKEA manual dump. 

It also doesn’t help that the three guys in the scene barely have any discernible personality aside from long fingers, big dongs, and wet tongues. The heroine may as well be having fun with a box of sex toys at this rate.

In the end, I find that there is little here that is noteworthy.

That’s a shame, because the premise itself could have lent to a dark, sexy story with genuine tension and danger. Not to mention, getting a hot, sexy a cannibal to become a vegan out of his love for the heroine would be the ultimate power fantasy, ooh.

Instead, all I get here are mechanical sex scenes that are in no way adequate to make up for the lack of everything else in the story.