Reviewed by Carissa

TITLE:  The Harvest: Taken

SERIES:  The Harvest #1

AUTHOR:  M.A. Church

PUBLISHER:  Storm Moon Press

LENGTH:  274 pages

BLURB: In the year 2050, humanity finds out they are indeed not alone.

Massive space ships appear without warning above the capital cities of all major nations. The planet Tah’Nar is dying. Chemical warfare has reduced the once-intersexed warrior race to sterility. They need fresh DNA in order to reproduce and have an idea for a harvesting program… and so they turn to Earth.

Earth governments negotiate a lottery, and Dale Michael assumes he’s safe since he’s under the Harvest age limit. How wrong he is. He’s illegally harvested and claimed by Tah’Narian starship captain KeynoShou. From the moment Keyno sees Dale, he knows he must claim the spirited human male for his own. What he doesn’t expect is a spitfire with a mind of his own—and a deadly disease that will require a risky procedure to cure.

REVIEW:

The year is 2050 and the Tah’Narhave come to earth.  Not looking for war or ways to fatten their pockets.  No, the Tah’Nar came to earth looking for men.  Their planet had been infected with a virus that prevented them from reproducing, and the Tah’Nar race was in serious danger of dying out.  When they come upon earth, and demand that the planet give up a certain percentage of the eligible males between the ages of 23 and 28, to help them fix the flawed Tah’Nar DNA, the shell-shocked governments of earth complied.

But things were not as they seemed, and when 22 year old Dale Michael was forcibly extracted from his house for The Harvest, no demand to be let free was answered.  No help was given.  He was to be taken to the captain, of the lead starship, KeynoShou.  Lies come to light, and so does a rather unsettling attraction between the Keyno and Dale.  Dale may hate what had been done to him, but he was finding it rather hard to hate the captain that had shown him every courtesy.  Well, except letting him go.

So what’s a guy to do, when he finds himself taken prisoner, had his DNA scrambled up with some pretty dicey Tah’Nar ones, and was told, not so delicately, that he’d be going on a nice one-way trip, on a pretty spaceship—and, oh yeah, he’dbe giving birth, eventually, to a nice little Terran-Tah’Nar hybrid?  Well, he probably shouldn’t have fallen in love with the asshole whoplanned on knocking him up.  Oops?

Over the last few months I have really started to get into the whole mpreg sub-genre of m/m romances.  It is not something that in my wildest of dreams I would have contemplated enjoying, even a few years ago, but, hey, a little weirdness never hurt a girl.  Right?  There is just something about watching guys freak out ‘cause the body ain’t supposed to do that!  That it usually happens in a scifi setting is a bonus, because I can never really get enough aliens in my life.  Spaceships, tails, blow-me-now, Scotty (that’s the correct quote, yes?)–all these things are a nice way to relax and spend a little time imagining myself on some cruising space ship with hunky alien boys bowing to my every whim.  I love scifi, and am coming to appreciate a good mpreg storyline, so I really didn’t want to pass this book up when I got a chance to read it.

This book had a good start, and I was really enjoying angry-Dale.  The man who had been basically kidnapped off his planet by an alien species, told he was now mated to this stranger, and that surprise!you’re going to be a daddy someday soon!  These are things to be angry about, or at the very least, severely annoyed–but after a few chapters Dale just kind of goes zen, and just gives up fighting back.  I didn’t exactly want him to be in a knock-out drag-down fight with Keyno for the entire book, but he went all Stockholm Syndrome at an alarmingly fast rate.  Which led me to worry that Keyno had done something to mess with Dale’s brain, and not just his DNA, when they were processing him.  This worry wasn’t helped with that offhanded comment about “subliminal messaging” when they were talking about rehabilitating some of the human mates.  If they could do it to the more rowdy of the humans in their counseling sessions, what was to stop them from doing it when the mates were learning with those fancy Tah’Nar learning glasses?  Which made me suspect that the whole romance between Dale and Keyno wasn’t exactly on the up-and-up.  Not exactly sure I should be cheering for a relationship that smacks of brain washing.

And everything, for the majority of the book, seemed to just float along.  I’m not exactly sure if there was a stable plot for this book, other than move characters from point A to point B.  The characters are all over each other from a real early point in the book, so that doesn’t really serve to hold my attention, and despite the occasional bouts of danger, there didn’t seem to be much tension in the story.  Colt causes problems in the beginning, but that is quickly resolved, and then Yar causes problems for a bit in the end, but the situation seems rather contrived.  All of a sudden this other Tah’Nar is thrown into the picture as competition/threat, but it was too obvious.  I knew that he was going to do something stupid, and that it really wasn’t going to affect the overall story.  I guess I was looking for more subtly in the tension, not just brief moments of flash-bang.

That being said, I probably will end up taking a look at book two, when it comes out.  I think this series has some real potential to grow, but I think to do that it needs to find a unique voice.  So far, this one was edging a little too close to cliché romance novel language, for my tastes.  But there were moments between Dale and Keyno that were both real and enticing to read.  There are some really interesting side characters that were not fully fleshed out in this book, but could, with a little work, become real hooks for the readers.  You have aliens, and not just the Tah”nar, running around in this space landscape and there is some pretty big potential for some really great fun.  Plus, I really do want to see how Dale handles that whole pregnancy thing.

RATING: 

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