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The Nourisher (2011)

by Mark Alders(Favorite Author)

4.17 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1554877989 (ISBN13: 9781554877980)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Extasy Books

series

Border Worlds Saga

review 1: Aaaaaannnd that was weird…really really weird. This book just wasn’t my cup of tea at all. Even if you take away all the over the top strangeness of eight feet tall alien spiders and wasp like creatures the story doesn’t hold together well for me at all. Not to mention it’s written in first person POV and falls into the majority where it bugs me the whole time. (Not my favorite POV at all.)Drake Glauco is happily married to his husband Jankin, has a successful law practice and is responsible for one of the largest treaties in the universe. Everything seems to be going perfectly until he arrives home early for his fifth wedding anniversary to find Jankin with another man. Storming out of his home results in Drake being kidnapped by alien smugglers and sold off ... moreto become an egg nourisher for a Priaxian incubator. Shortly Drake finds his entire life changed and more than one threat to his and his new lover’s existence. Vernon is a Priaxian, an alien race of giant spider people. He has just reached his emotional maturity and after saving the life of one of the young in the colony has been granted the right to fulfill his duties as an incubator. With the natural nourishers from his home planet dying off from disease the Priaxian’s have had to look for outside sources. The human race has been found to be compatible even if they’re bondings take longer to come to maturity than with the nourishers from Vernon’s home planet. When Drake is brought to Vernon he couldn’t be happier, now he just has to convince his mate of it all.I felt like I was missing something the entire time I was reading this story, nothing ever seemed to make complete sense. Now I’m not someone who gets squicked out by spiders…I grew up on a 500 acre ranch, bugs just don’t really bother me. That doesn’t mean I find the idea of sex with one appealing. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of Drake finding Vernon attractive. The whole being turned on by and rubbing up against the hairy spider…yeah that got a little squicky. A lot of the details of the varying worlds I found to be really fascinating. I enjoyed the backdrop building more than I did the actual story. Living and organic ships and the way both the spider and wasp cultures were depicted were quite interesting and unique. If this had been pure science fiction I think I would have probably enjoyed it a lot more. The romantic elements just didn’t blend well with it all for me. Overall though I think my biggest problem was in the plot elements. Everything just kept getting re-written. Every new plot point that was thrown out was back tracked over. He’s a bad guy, he’s a good guy, he’s a bad guy really, well maybe not. The actions and reactions never clearly made sense to me either. I could never figure out exactly why the treaty Drake had helped create was such a problem for everyone, nor why taking him out of everything was going to have such an affect. He’s just a lawyer, he’s not a diplomat or a head of state. How much influence he has over the actual governing bodies of the human worlds I can’t comprehend. Now if I can get over the strange union of a spider and a man I still have a problem with some of the reactions. Drake is drugged, kidnapped, and essentially sold into sexual slavery, but he basically asks for a quick explanation and then goes ok cool I’m fine with that. He had no freak out about anything and is pretty much immediately comfortably in love with a creature who not only forced him into a bond but is completely outside his species. It just didn’t track for me at all.Just not my cup of tea. I wasn’t a fan of the style of this book and then nothing about the story really captured me to take my mind off of it either. The creativity and thought that went into the world is really the most interesting part of this book for me. I would have really enjoyed a pure adventure story in this world I think, but this just became more and more ridiculous, convoluted and over the top. Hurt, healthy, hurt, healthy, dead ship, live ship, bad aliens, but then they’re on our side, then they’re not again…flip flopped a lot. I didn’t do anything to enhance the story for me it just made it more inconsistent. This isn’t a series I’ll be returning to.
review 2: It's hard to rate this book, since it (and its sequels) are a mixed bag. On one hand, Alders built an interesting world that's creative, to say the least of it. On the other hand, the prose pretty much broke it for me.The prose feels simplistic, and has a YA feeling to it, which made me feel like I'm a teen all over again huddling down with the latest PG-13 book for well, 13-year-olds. The descriptions are very lacking, and a whole world can be explained within three sentences. Spaceships, gates, and species aren't described properly, so you only have a vague arthropodal impression of them. The same problem with the setting leaks into the characters. Drake's reaction to being kidnapped, almost killed, and sold into what is essentially sex slavery is unrealistic, even for a book about alien spiders. And he goes from being unrealistically calm about the whole ordeal, to accepting and falling in love with Vernon within half a book? Well, okay.Vernon is very lovable, admittedly, like many reviews have mentioned. Unfortunately, he is also the only character with any sort of personality, and even then it feels like he's just made out of tropes. A character tagged with tags like 'cute', 'fuzzy', 'innocent', and 'clueless' without any real substance or motivation to it.It's not a bad book per se, if you just want to read a Sci-fi book featuring lots of intergalactic travelling. The book carves a place between erotica (I'm hesitant to call it MM...) and sci-fi, but does both poorly. You'll be better served with another book, unless you REALLY like your aliens. less

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