Robin Lovett

If you've read my earlier reviews of this series (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3), you know that they are absolutely bananas erotic romance and I love them. I'm not reading much ERom at all these days, so for me to be continuing this series says something.


Here are the bananas: sex goddess with a magic vagina (she also has essentially 3 clits and "claws" inside that grip when she comes), she's got a magical gift that allows her to make anyone orgasm with a touch, her love interest was genetically engineered to be super-swole but also unable to sense touch and his emotions are locked up. She fixes him with sex in what is an absolutely delightful twist on the Magic Penis trope. Star-crossed lovers! He's in hiding! She's not allowed to fall in love! All of this happens over the course of four days and it's absolutely ridiculous but *shrug* I am more than happy to roll with it. There's a ton of creative sex furniture and I had fun trying to figure out what it was shaped like. Anyway, please buy and read it so Robin Lovett will write like 15 more. (I've purchased them after reading for this exact reason.)


Content Warnings: violence, parental abuse, kidnapping and torture (briefly), discussion of possibly being forced to have sex with anyone who needs magic sex healing

Suzanne received a digital copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.… (lisätietoja)

This is the third in Lovett's sex planet books (Planet of Desire is the correct series name) and I enjoyed it but not quite as much as the first two. Jenie is an alien herself, so it's her with a genetic mating bond to worry about for a change. She's convinced that penetrative sex is going to seal the deal, as it were, so she spends most of the book fighting both the sex planet toxin (read more about that here) and the mating bond.


Her mate? Koviye, who we meet in the first two books, a Fellamana with a special power. You don't need to have read these earlier installments, but they do explain the Fellamana culture and provide context for the central conflict in the book. Koviye's power, the exstare, is a sort of magical orgasm that the Fellamana believe must be shared equally among all of their people. They are a polyamorous civilization and everyone is convinced that they're incapable of monogamy. Kind of makes it hard to have an exclusive mating bond, no?


The book is full of blisteringly hot sex since Koviye can dream-travel, but it's not anchored by a great subplot. The two of them spend a good bit of time in a ship heading off to rescue characters from the previous book, only to find that they don't need to. They do have their own adventure, but I wasn't engaged with that storyline and skimmed it.


Other than this lackluster adventure plot, I didn't understand why Koviye couldn't keep putting his hand on people to give them the exstare and still be committed to Jenie. Their solution is a spoiler, so I'll keep it to myself, but it didn't make much sense to me.


Will that stop me from reading future sex planet books? Nope. The plot already doesn't make sense (sex toxin? dream-travel? mental orgasms?) so it's not like anyone is reading these for the physics and anthropological study. We're reading them for a bonkers sexcapades, including zero-gravity business against the roof of a ship, conveniently-engineered spacesuits, and sparkling blue aphrodisiac semen. If that's what you want, that's what you'll get.





Content Warnings: heroine's family dies long before story, there's some war-related violence and death





Suzanne received a digital copy of this book from the publisher for review via NetGalley.… (lisätietoja)

This book. *fans self*

Captive Desire is the second in Robin Lovett's Planet of Desire series of erotic sci-fi romances. Each book stands alone and I can confirm that I really enjoyed this one without having yet read the first, Toxic Desire. The premise is that a ship of rebel humans has been shot down and crash-landed on a sex planet. Yes, there's a toxin in the air that makes everyone need to have sex. Without an antidote, the toxin will eventually kill them.

On the planet are two groups, the Fellamana and the Ssedez. The Fellamana are native to the sex planet and have very fluid attitudes toward sex and desire and intimacy. The Ssedez are not so open, in large part because they have what they call "The Attachment," their version of fated mates.

The hero of this novel, Gahnin, lost his mate 100 years ago when humans killed her and their child. The mourning period is set at 200 years, so he's still in morning when the book begins. The heroine, Assura, is a human who's worked for years as a professional torturer for the human general, Dargrule. (We find out later that she took on the job so she could help the people she was assigned to torture, it's complicated.) True enemies-to-lovers.

Anyway, they meet up and she's taken prisoner for a short period. Then she and Gahnin fight, which breaks the Fellamana nonviolence laws. Their punishment? They have to participate in the sex games. By this point, the hero and heroine have already been engaging in all manner of sex-planet-induced shenanigans, and their "display" is intense. There's a lot of sex in this book, some of it rather inventive.

While this is an erotic romance, it's still definitely a romance. The two are reluctant to open their hearts, but all of the sex is enthusiastically consensual. There are repeated check-ins and it doesn't feel coercive like some sci-fi romances I've read.

There's also a substantial plot involving the spaceship that Assura and the rebels broke off from. I won't spoil it for you, but it was definitely rewarding. My one complaint is that I wanted the book to be a bit longer, with more of an emotional payoff for the central couple. There's absolutely an HEA, but Gahnin gives in to the Attachment pretty swiftly.

I have the first book on my Kobo and I plan to dig in this weekend. These are intense (and excellent) books, which means I read until around 2 am and that's not a weeknight activity!… (lisätietoja)