A review by shelfgremlin
Pheromone by C.M. Stunich

Did not finish book. Stopped at 54%.

dnf @ 55% (ch 13) - may revisit in future

this book was honestly unique so i have to give the author props for her imagination. these aliens were different from anything i've read before and that was pretty refreshing. 

the premise is that our female mc, Eve, is kidnapped by aliens along with her bestie Jane, a haughty lawyer, two paramedics, and (most odd of all) a "pretentious hellion" of a pop star named Tabbi Kat and her pet opossum, Madonna. it's honestly the strangest abduction i have ever read and fascinatingly interesting. 

post-abduction, eve wakes up in a market where she and her friends are the merchandise. she is bought, saved, nearly killed, and mated all within the first 12 chapters. it's so hard to talk about the premise without giving too much away (but it is an alien romance so it does follow at least some expected themes.) 

the primary alien love interest in this book is an aspis that eve affectionately nicknames abraxos. the description of him is so strange that my mind is having a really difficult time wrapping around it. 

he's all black with a mouth that appears to not even be there at all until he smiles or bears his teeth. he has a freakishly long tongue and is described once as almost dragon-like. he has a dark shadow? mist? that clings to him and moves about and several places on his body are a bioluminescent purple. he can be on four legs or two and seems equally comfortable in both. oh! and he can change his size. 

His legs are thick and muscular, but shapely, with large, clawed feet caught somewhere between a human’s and a canine’s. Only, he’s entirely covered in scales. Other than some sort of mane on his head and down his neck, there’s no other hair (or fur?) to be seen. A large muscular tail twitches behind him like a cat and, as I move to stand up, a row of spikes lifts down the center, like an animal raising its hackles. His mane rises along with it, and I realize immediately that he doesn’t have hair, just more of those strange spikes on his head, neck, and spine. 

i cannot picture this alien for the life of me. but i definitely picked up on the scary vibe so that wasn't too big of a deal for me. 

i kept laughing at the way eve and abraxos met.

after he butchered eve's purchaser he went after her and her panicked cursing gave him the impression she was demanding to be fucked. 😂

despite his big, mean, scary appearance, he saved her from certain doom and took her back to his den. he was evidently courting her and would preen over the slightest compliments, but they had a heck of a time trying to communicate at first. 

it was all pretty cute to be honest. as all of this is going down we're also being introduced more and more to the forest that abraxos lives in (which is also very cool.) 

inevitably though, eve just has to go getting herself in trouble and mucking it all up. typical. 

i dnf'ed at chapter 13, just after she and abraxos officially mated. i was really enjoying the book up until that point, but there were a few things that put me off. primarily that i did not expect this to be a love geometry book and the angst i'm feeling over it is not making me happy. i have no problems with ménage/love triangle books in general, but it's not what i want to read right now and not what i expected from this book with how much i adored abraxos. 

silly me read the synopsis for book two and realized that there's at least two more aliens who have their eye on eve and she falls in love with at least one of them and becomes their mate. not to mention, there was a random chapter where the pov switched to an alien cop who has a fetish for humans and human things so it was clear he was supposed to be a bigger part of the picture. the royalty of the planet (described as a moth guy) also claimed she was his mate and is refusing to give up on finding her. i don't like him very much and i do not want to read about his redemption right now. i'm pretty salty about it.

the plot feels very chaotic with all the unexpected switch-ups and my brain has checked out, so i'm dnf'ing this one for now. i might revisit it in the future when im looking for this sort of trope.