coral reviewed Neanderthal Seeks Human by Penny Reid
None
3 stars
Having read the entire series, I will now come back and write my review, not so much on book one, but on the series itself.
The good
I deeply love the friendship these women share. They are honest with each other, and they push each other to be better (with the caveat that it's, you know, a romance series, so part of "being better" is assumed to be "being with a partner"). There are also some fibercraft in-jokes, but not enough to be really overwhelming or annoying if you don't knit/crochet.
I also generally like the pacing of these books and the fact that every single one of them has some kind of exciting thing happen, some sort of action sequence; some of them are at least a quarter "action" book instead of romance, and I will always love genre-melding. I like the callbacks to in-jokes from previous books.
The …
Having read the entire series, I will now come back and write my review, not so much on book one, but on the series itself.
The good
I deeply love the friendship these women share. They are honest with each other, and they push each other to be better (with the caveat that it's, you know, a romance series, so part of "being better" is assumed to be "being with a partner"). There are also some fibercraft in-jokes, but not enough to be really overwhelming or annoying if you don't knit/crochet.
I also generally like the pacing of these books and the fact that every single one of them has some kind of exciting thing happen, some sort of action sequence; some of them are at least a quarter "action" book instead of romance, and I will always love genre-melding. I like the callbacks to in-jokes from previous books.
The bad
I absolutely hate every man (except for one, who is mostly pretty OK) in "his" book, no matter how much I might like him in every other book where he shows up. Dan's the only tolerable one. Greg is the absolute worst; I hate him so much. Some of them are absolutely great, outside of "their" books, but they're overbearing and terrible as romantic leads.
These books also take some hard stances on the wrong side of a couple of technological issues, such as being in favor of Bitcoin, destroyer of climates, and unaware of the bias inherent in modern AI, which is out there ruining lives right now. I don't expect deeply thoughtful takes about technology in my romance, but I also hate being slapped in the face by the kinds of takes in these books. You've really got to research the field a little more deeply, and maybe read a few things by BIPOC and gender minorities, before building a book around a premise like those.
Any of my other critiques are kind of the same for these as for most straight romances: they all want babies, gender norms are such a thing, and the only gay character is a stereotype. Etc. Etc. I might like her mysteries better, given that she writes a good action sequence, so I'll keep an eye out for the next time one comes up at the library.