Penelope Peters, $2.99, ISBN 978-0463718193
Fantasy Romance, 2016

It’s interesting how Penelope Peters’s The Omega Nanny is more coherent and readable than her other efforts that I’ve read, when this one is a much earlier effort than those others. Maybe she had a good editor for this particular story?

Still, it’s a Penelope Peters story, so expect the usual male pregnancy and other woo-woo stuff to clutter up what is otherwise a thoroughly formulaic and ordinary story.

At its core, we have Thomas Whittaker whose last mate died after giving him a daughter. He’s a workaholic because there’s only one kind of romantic single father in the romance genre, and his sister hires Kieran Corvey to become the nanny of his daughter.  

It’s a very familiar story at its core, but I suppose actually making characters get to know one another and falling in love is tiresome, so the author has Thomas be an alpha and Kieran be an omega so yay, mate-mate-mate bugaloo. Throw in some woo-woo stuff, some pack politics stuff, and what is otherwise a familiar story becomes familiar but unnecessarily bogged down by woo-woo window dressing that adds little to the overall story.

I mean, even the male pregnancy thing. Even if it’s aimed at readers with a fetish for this kind of thing, the author doesn’t do anything with that angle at all aside from just making men moms.

This male pregnancy angle makes me roll up my eyes, actually, when the author has another character yap about how his mate almost died giving birth the last time but yay, the mate is pregnant again. Really? Do we want to go down that route of difficult pregnancies being a sign of true love or something? That’s one can of worms that really shouldn’t be opened, unless the author is really bored and wants some negative attention, I guess.

At the end of the day, there is nothing memorable about this story. It’s bland, it’s formulaic, and no amount of woo-woo distractions that hide that.

However, I’d give the author some credit in not making Kieran some wildly emotional, shrieking, overly sensitive crybaby bottom-in-distress like most authors would do. Thomas isn’t the usual psychotic dominant alpha type either. 

Hence, while this one isn’t amazing, it doesn’t annoy me by being a complete rehash of tired old clichés so I guess it’s alright. Faint praise, I know, but hey, it’s not like this thing deserves anything more.