Zoey Indiana, $0.99, ISBN 978-1005004958
Fantasy Romance, 2021
No matter what it turns out to be, Zoey Indiana’s Totally Sparked gets my award for the best opening chapter title that I’ve come across in a long while:
I JUST INTRODUCED MYSELF TO MY FATED MATE BY BREAKING HIS DICK.
It does get me thinking, even before I read the story: if one’s fated mate has his dick broken, can one get a refund or something? Can they just un-mate the whole thing and ask for a new one?
I haven’t read this series in a while, and reading this one, I now remember I gave myself a break after reading a few other stories in the series. Like those stories, this one is short and it just goes from some quirky-cute meet to sex and then a happily ever after that is justified by the fact that these two are mated so it’s really true love.
Here, Slate is on a well-deserved, much-needed staycation when he is called to help with a friend’s power outage issue. There, he meets our heroine Lo the dick breaker, with the said injurious episode being presented as a cute thing, and then they have sex and yay, it’s love.
“I don’t give a fuck that our mates are human. The gods fated those women to be our mates, and that’s all we need to know.”
See? Who needs an actual romantic relationship? It’s fated, a divine decree, so stop questioning and keep consuming products!
I probably should read the author’s longer works because I feel like she is slumming big time with stories like this. This one is too short to make any impact aside from adding some small change into the author’s PayPal account, so I don’t know what the point of the whole thing is. A quick flick and forget? A short distraction on super slow days?
The author could have at least mixed things up. Maybe make the hero a were-weevil for laughs or make it so that the hero and the heroine are so totally not into the other person at first for superficial reasons. That or perhaps give the hero or the heroine an unusual job. It doesn’t even have to be an unusual job, actually—why can’t bag boys and girls find fated mates too?
Anyway, this one is an alright read in itself, I guess. It’s too well put together to be considered an awful read… but as I’ve said, it’s so short and pointless, I’m not sure why anyone should bother with it. It’s too short to be romantic, erotic, or manic, so what’s the point, really.
