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Book Review of The Star King (Star, Bk 1)

The Star King (Star, Bk 1)
The Star King (Star, Bk 1)
Author: Susan Grant
Genre: Romance
Book Type: Mass Market Paperback
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The Star King starts with a bang, literally, as Jasmine Hamilton fights to keep her F-16 fighter plane in the air. Shot down by friendly fire over the hot Iraqi desert. Hurt on an arrid desert, she prepares for anything but what occurs--she has an out of body experience, a transcendent encounter with another wounded warrior. Painfully, Jas and Rom save each other, with a shared passion that will leave you limp... Rom B'kah's otherworldly perspective of the unusual woman with dark hair is one of meeting his destiny. He is in the midst of a battle of galactic proportions with life-threatening injuries and has just witnessed his brother's death. Her presence both encourages and dooms him, he survives because of her but the physical ramifications of lingering too long in a hostile environment make him an outcast from his family. Abruptly, twenty years later, Jas' youthful fire has been extinguished. Now she's a dutiful mother stung by divorce who long ago gave up victory rolls in an F16 for a minivan, a surprisingly-talented artist who paints promising but only half-finished paintings. Then earth receives visitors from an advanced civilization. Among them, Rom re-appears, and Jas' real life could begin--if her golden, aristocratic ET weren't hardened by cruel fortune and a fruitless search over time and space for the mythic desert angel who once saved him. ..............

Susan's interpretation of an alien arrival into earth's politics is wel done --for example no one automatically speaks our languages. And this story is above all a Clean ROMANCE (No adult situations). She doesn't bog us down with lengthy technical data about how things work or descriptions of weird life forms. However for those very same reasons this story fals into Romnce category and not the Scify category, which is a shame because the book has a great promisse as such. And even though the story is not original (it has been over done in this genre) it was fairly well fleshed out. The few cons: Do not get me wrong, I think romance can happen at any age but Jas has been miss represented and her character acting out of character: An F-16 pilots are 30ish+ then add the 20 years till meting Rom so that makes her 50+ year old woman, who still has her period and thinks missing it might mean she is pregnant. She has two 19 year old kids, acting like her siblings. And the attitude (read naivete/stupidity) of a 19 year old. She also acts like a know it all sage, the toughest macho guy on the block, psychologist and passionate, gentle soul artist. In short she is so perfect, no character devalopement is possible. It is also anoying a bit. The good part is that Rom is well fleshed out and all the supporting charaters are too, including the vilan. It is a decent read for scify (3*), and pretty good read as a romance (4*) so I give it 3.5* as a whole.