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I remember when this was going around on TikTok and I got a good laugh about it but didn’t think much of it. Then some of my friends read it and said it’s unironically pretty good, and now I have given in.
And I’m happy to say they’re right!

One of the first things that stood out to me was the main character, Violet’s, anxiety. Because my god was it spot on for the way my anxiety works too. Not gonna lie, it felt so uncannily accurate to me that I even got annoyed with her because it felt so familiar and these are the things I get annoyed with in myself too.

The second thing, which I maybe should have expected, was the way the entire “so my job is to jerk off minotaurs now” was handled. Because it was done in a very plausible and professional, as well as clinical, manner. Of course there is little plausibility in minotaur semen being the #1 ingredient in viagra, therefore its in high demand and “milking farms” being big pharma’s response to that demand. But here it just works. It’s just ridiculous enough to be funny and have a good laugh, but within the scope of this fictional world where beings from myths and legends are sharing our world, complete with all the adaptions and concessions such world would have to make to make this cohabitation feasible, this is just one more weird niche. And why not?!

This brings me to the third thing I really enjoyed, which was the worldbuilding. It’s not all massive bull dongs and hand jobs here, oh no, there’s plenty of exploration of the world of inhuman creatures too. The milking farm is in the middle of a multi-cultural suburb which Violet explores for a significant amount of time, and a good chunk of the book is spent on her misadventures, encounter and observations as a human having lived in human-majority places alll her life. I also suspect this sets the ground work for the shared universe series this book is part of.
And I enjoyed it a lot! There wasn’t super much detail about the different beings, the minotaurs, elves, vampires, ogres, trolls, orcs, centaurs, etc. themselves, but more about what some of their daily lives in a modern (predominantly human) world looks like, the accomodations and adaptions they have made.

Lastly there are the work, and the romance between Violet and one of her repeat clients. After the initial deciding on the job and training, the day to day work at the milking farm becomes quite matter of fact, which I did enjoy seeing. The one thing that never stayed entirely professioal was Violet’s encounters with one specific client, who of course is the main love interest. For me there was big of a lack of why these two were so into each other from the very start, when they barely saw or interacted with each other for a good bit, and when both were in situations where they had no issue being perfectly professional with anyone else. But I guess attraction cannot always be easily explained. Still, that was my main complaint with this book, as well as how some of their conversations done at the workplace, and sometimes in the presence of colleagues, were clearly crossing the line, and made me very uncomfortable. (Noone in the book was uncomfy though so there’s that.)

Another small irritation for me was a specific conversation about the nature of human-nonhuman interactions. One character directly says that humans never interact with nonhumans, except when it’s a human woman getting “curious” about sex with a nonhuman. And when she does experiment, she would “never go back”. That felt reductive and almost fetishizing to me, and had some uncomfortable undertones. Thankfully, this sentiment isn’t ever expressed in other conversations or by the main character.

Lastly I want to mention that while the writing was perfectly fine, it was a bit vague in some parts. For example, while it is mentioned plenty of times that Violet has studied and can’t find a job in her field, it’s never made entirely clear what she studied, and the field is only vaguely revealed towards the end. Kind of similar with the love interest and his field of work too.
Another thing was the time tense switches – a lot of things are told in retrospect with Violet thinking back to it. But the switches between what is present and what’s a memory weren’t clearly marked and sometimes hard to follow. It also made the timeline hard to follow or figure out order of events sometimes.

Overall a solid monster romance, with an interesting spin and intriguing background setting.

Check the book out on Goodreads and buy it here. It is available via Kindle Unlimited.

~iam