This was totally unexpected and very different from what title, cover and description make you believe. I loved it to pieces – except the constant and flippant misgendering of the love interest made this harmful and a huge disappointment.
This wasn’t in the contract.
Simon Quigley had no idea what to expect when he agreed to do this for the money, but the eight-foot-tall pink alien isn’t what he was expecting. For starters, Simon’s straight.
And Mohrn isn’t a girl.
The contract? It’s unbreakable.
It’s going to be a long five years…
Content warnings include: near constant misgendering that is acknowledged repeatedly yet almost always brushed away with “whatever”, cis- and binary-normativity, imprionment, group sex, sex on- and off-page, contractual sex and a lot of invasive and body altering surgical procedures (consensual), what boils down to “mail order bride” system, fraud, egg-laying; mentions of death of parent, death threats.
First of all, the cover and official descriptions convey a very wrong image and doesn’t reflect the story or tone of the book at all. Like, to start of, yes, “it” absolutely was in the contract. Second, they aren’t mates or in jail together. Third, this isn’t alien erotica or an m/m romance. (It’s an alien romance with focus on background plots rather than the romance itself, and the alien is not male, but nonbinary.)
The plot follows Simon, who after finishing his contract with the military wants a cushy job to provide for his mother and sister and fund their educations, and he stumbles over a well-paying mail-order bride-like job. Instead of this being a story about him being scammed into a sordid contract, there is a lot of details about the scientifical research and the legal and ethical contract behind it. A good third of the book is spent on Simon rethinking his options, and him talking with the doctor facilitating the contract – who also spends a considerable amount of time telling Simon to read the entire contract, which Simon does not do.
This was already unexpected, but delighted me, and the surprises continued when Simon met Mohrn, the alien he is contractually obligated to sleep with regularly. Their relationship was lovely and loving from the start, with a certain love-at-first-sight element to it, but this really is one of the times I truly wasn’t bothered by that. Despite Mohrn and Simon spending a lot of time apart, it was very sweet and never boring.
What I truly hated however was the constant misgendering. When Simon first sees a picture of Mohrn, he for some reason assumes Mohrn to be female. No idea why. He quickly is informed that the Pfahrn, the alien species Mohrn belongs to, do not have genders and all use the pronouns phey/phem/pheir. Here came the first detail that made me wince: These alien have a specific set of (to us) neopronouns, but are still mostly referred to with they/them pronouns for some reason instead of their actual pronouns.
But even after being told this, Simon keeps talking about Mohrn using she/her. Then when he meets Mohrn and realizes phey have a penis, this switches to he/him, which is terribly cissexist.
What made this even more infuriating was that Simon does correct himself in his flow of consciousness and direct speech. BUT. Every. Single. Correction. is followed up by a “whatever”. This is so flippant and disrespectful it made me fume every single time.
Simon even talks to Mohrn and apologises for not getting pronouns right, yet doesn’t seem to make any effort to correct himself. He keeps asking the reader to “cut him some slack”, and insinuates that it’s the aliens that are weird and he as a human (who are a “binary species”) can’t be expected to think this is normal.
As a nonbinary trans reader, I found this othering and hated every instance of this, and there were A LOT.
What made this even more infuriating was that Simon aside, none of the aliens have problems with the pronouns. And after Simon and Mohrn’s relationship goes a step further, Simon suddenly has no issues using they/them, and after a year passes he consistenly uses phey/phem correctly (though he still treats this as being super weird and “not normal”). So it’s not even an issue of not understanding how (neo-)pronouns work. This constant othering was willfully implemented as part of the story.
Additionally, the author clearly has not spent a single thought to the existence of trans people, be it binary or nonbinary. Humans are assumed to be stricly binary, and at some points gender and sexual identity are confused.
I am so annoyed by this, because if not for this constant and deliberate misgendering this could have become a new favourite. As it was this felt too transphobic to me. Sure, misgendering happens in real life, but this is a book. It was edited. The misgendering was deliberately included and continuously brushed off on-page as “whatever” – even when the protagonist uses the correct pronouns, he remarks upon how weird and unnatural it is.
I wanted to talk more about the plot and some of the more delightful and (positive) unexpected things in this book, but after revisiting all the misgendering and talking about it I no longer want to. I already get misgendered regularly in my life, and regularly have to misgender myself to keep myself save. I don’t need to read about this in what’s supposed to be escapism.
Check the book out on Goodreads and buy it here.
~iam
MI Book Reviews 