Allister by C.L. Rowell

2 Stars

The writing and editing of this very short story was clean, with few typos that I found in the ARC version of the manuscript. The world building was not great, being largely set on contemporary Earth. The characterization was not awesome, largely because this very short page count did not leave room for developing much character nuance. The development of the romantic relationship was very quick, and I the reader was not convinced that these two protagonists truly loved each other by the end of the story. Also, there were no on page sexy times in this sci-fi romance, which was a big strike against it, in my opinion. The plot and pacing was quick. There was low angst and fairly high stakes in this short story, which is typically one of my preferred narrative structures for a romance novel, but which I did not enjoy much in this case. The world building, characterization, and development of the romantic relationship rated three stars. The plot and pacing also rated three stars. The reason I gave this story a combined score of two stars was partially because of the lack of on page sexy times, but mostly because of the cliffhanger ending. I do not recommend this story to other readers largely because of the cliffhanger ending. I do not plan to read any other stories is this series, and I will not be buying a keeper copy of this story for myself.

I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.

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