Twice the Growl

I'm seven books into this series, because they are part of Audible's romance package and therefore "free" for me to listen to (yeah, I know, I need to kick my Audible habit, or else I'm supporting Amazon, and Amazon lets people die in their warehouses... I am working on it). These books are all very ... fast. (This one is 152 pages, or something like that, if you read it as a paperback.) They follow the same formula, to the point where you know who the heroine of the next book will be, sometimes well before the end of the current book. There is very little suspense. If you prefer a slow burn, skip these.

I'm taking the time to review the series, though, because I like that these books all have women of color as protagonists, though I don't love how much time most of them spend straightening their hair. I love that they have fat women (though that word is never used; mostly it's "curvy") as protagonists, too, and NONE of them lose weight, ever. Most of them claim to like their bodies, though several of them spend an appalling amount of time apologizing for their bodies' size, despite that. The [sadly uncommon] choice to have plus-sized women who don't have to lose weight to find love, plus some curiosity about the matchmaker, is what keeps me downloading the next one and listening to it, so far. (It isn't the men. They are ... not all winners, by a long shot.)

I admit: I do a lot of other stuff while I'm listening to these, because the details are not important. You know what's going to happen from page one. There might be a twist that makes things more complicated, but it is short-lived and easily overcome. The sex scenes are pretty good, if you're into that. (I, increasingly, am not. But my essay about why I still love romance books, despite being pretty tired of sex scenes, goes somewhere else, not in this book review.)

These are all very cishet, so far. And the fact that these fat women can only find love from shifters who we later find out are actually aliens, or children of aliens + humans, and never from human men, is ... kinda problematic, I suppose.

I mean, like I said, right? Three stars. They aren't bad. I like them OK. But they aren't great, either.