LoveSpell, $5.99, ISBN 0-505-52469-4
Sci-fi Romance, 2002

I like Out of the Blue, but my recommendation comes with a fine print: I am a sucker for campy, oddball sci-fi comedy and this book fits that comedy envelope perfectly. As a romance, it’s rather pathetic, but as a sci-fi comedy it’s pretty good.

Maryellen Caswell has a strange dilemma. Her body is being occupied by an alien. No, this is not that Alien thing where an ugly critter will burst out of Maryellen’s bloody rib cage as she twitches her last death throes. Sub-commander Ur Targon is an alien who needs a host body when he visits Earth for what seems like some alien’s idea of R&R, and his people plays a joke on him by zapping him into Maryellen’s body.

Maryellen is not happy. Now she is sharing her body with an annoying male fiend bent on saving J Edgar Hoover from what he believes to be an FBI conspiracy (he read this in Times)! Ooh, the outrage. I laugh myself silly – yes, I’m ten – at that J Edgar Hoover thing. An American reader, I’m sure, will probably get some inside joke or something, but me, I don’t know. I think it’s stupid but funny. Must be too much caffeine.

In fact, I just giggled like a silly gnat when Targon runs “his” hands all over “his” new body in the chapter to confirm that he is now a woman. Ooh! Maryellen, naturally, is a virgin who will scream her head off if her own hands fall into a spot on her body lower than her neck. Heh. I even laughed myself silly when Targon says that Earth people are unnaturally obsessed with virginity. If this is how the author sees her world, heh.

But I didn’t laugh when FBI Agent Wolf Madder come into the picture. Uh, Ms Deauxville, yes, I get the Wolf Madder thing, but Sue Civil-Brown did it first and better. I also find Targon’s insufferable sense of entitlement and how he insists that Maryellen stops and drops everything to amuse him grating on my nerves after a while – wherever Targon come from, “character development” doesn’t exist there.

But I really bend over laughing until my stomach hurt at this concept that Targon needs to find a sexy, handsome, muscular body of a dying man so that he can finally have sex with Maryellen. Hmm, a dying sexy, handsome, muscular man, huh? How does one find that? But if the author wants the heroine spending the rest of her life happily boinking a corpse, well, who am I to disagree?

Have fun, Maryellen! Her story doesn’t make much sense if one wants to be logical, but it’s a hoot and a riot nonetheless. It’s pretty much a fluffy, don’t-think-just-enjoy kind of story that doesn’t take itself seriously.