Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Okay, look. I really wanted to like Choosing Theo by Victoria Aveline. The premise is solid – alien abduction, grumpy/sunshine dynamics bordering on enemies to lovers, interesting power imbalances where she’s supposed to be protected by intergalactic law, but can’t actually navigate society herself. There’s potential here, but the execution isn’t quite there.
Jade is abducted by aliens but escapes and is rescued by the Clecanians (who have the same ancestors as humans). Unfortunately, Jade can’t go back to Earth and according to the rules of the Intergalactic Alliance, she must stay in Clecania for one year to learn how to take care of herself under these new circumstances. During this year, she must follow their customs and marry a local. But due to them having a 20-to-1 male-to-female ratio in the population, marriages have trial periods.
Through a highly standardised selection process, Jade ends up choosing Theo, a mercenary who has been passed over by local women many times over because of his scars. Theo quickly assumes this is false and pegs Jade as a spy sent by his enemies to kill him.
Let’s start with the good stuff.
There were genuinely good moments. I really do love the grumpy/sunshine that is bordering on enemies to lovers. The narrator has a very pleasant voice, which helped get me through the rougher patches. And hah, I do love a good manhandling 🫦
The sleep spray for the abductions is a nice twist. It could have been a lot more cliché, but I really appreciated that take on it.
I do think that the story drags on in the beginning and could probably have lost about 10% off the start without losing momentum. Like for instance, the FMC and MMC don’t even meet until about 30% into the story, and we spend the whole time before that slogging through the book telling us about a world that is a lot like Earth.
I like the power imbalance dynamics – that she’s supposed to be protected (theoretically) by these ‘abduction conventions’ but has few options to make that a reality if she’s in trouble since she can’t navigate this alien society. That’s genuinely interesting tension.
The cultural differences between Jade and Theo could have been a really good plot point, but were really under used. I also appreciated that she’s not just a passive captive, that she’s trying to find a way out herself. And when she passes out, so the story can skip ahead, rather than suddenly turns into this superhuman woman who can take on an action scene with fighting just because her mate is there – that I really appreciated, too.
The third act separation being external rather than just them not communicating was also refreshing, even if I could smell that third act break up coming from miles away.
However, I do think that Theo being a mercenary could have been used more, him searching for her via conventional means and then the bond being the clincher that helps her pinpoint where she is when he’s hunting for her. But the action of him going to find the rest of the captives gets cut out as Jade passes out, which was sad only because I have a competency kink.
But oh my god, these info dumps are sizeable and a total slog. The dialogue is also really expositional, not in an interesting way, just in an info dumpy way. And this is the book’s biggest weakness – it tells instead of shows, constantly. The world-building gets delivered in chunks that feel like homework rather than natural discovery.
Theo is very perfect and I think it would have been be funnier if his test scores for the marriage test had been more uneven (y’know use it for comedic relief and to build tension). The juxtaposition of the men at the marriage choosing could also have been more interesting.
But this all falls back to the telling rather than showing, the book trusting that we’ll just fill in the blanks and make it more interesting than it actually is.
The wish-fulfilment with men going to school to learn how to be good husbands (learning how to care for a wife and do house chores etc.) is a really interesting take. But again, seems to not really go beyond taking how real life too often is and just reversing it without any further thought, so ends up a bit frustrating in its shallowness.
The porcelain doll (and other issues).
I do not appreciate the porcelain shaved sex doll transformation that Jade goes through. Yes, fine she leaves her tattoos and a few scars, but agrees to have arms, legs, genitalia shaved, along with a pair of new nice, perky boobs? If Theo is gonna be full of scars and rough and rugged in a sexy way, she should not have to be perfect either – especially since women have the upper hand on this world and can reject mates easily!
Having a personal preference for a shaved pussy is one thing, but having a whole societal standard of hairless women (I don’t think the men have been mentioned?) is giving unexamined patriarchal stereotypes rooted in paedophilia here.
Jade just happily has her skin smoothed of all wrinkles (who wants wrinkles on your fingers?) and removing everything except hair on her head, eyebrows and eye lashes. Her making the argument that scars are your story written all over your body and that she’d never change any imperfections on her are completely negated by her choice to let them enhance almost everything about her. The hypocrisy is staggering.
Another thing that had me frowning was the children’s book mention. “An old children’s book she’d loved flashed in her mind: ‘if you give a girl a chiselled peck, she’ll ask for a bulging bicep’.” What the fuck kind of children’s story is this?!? I like the fact that he took her comment to lick the scars as an actual offer rather than just an off-handed comment, but carrying on with this theme of bringing up things related to kids when things get romantic/steamy is doing this story no favours. Just… why?
And this monogamy rule for a world struggling to survive is dumb.
Having a woman move on from one permanent home and relationship to the next one once she’s “done her duty” should make the women really callous and entitled and I’m not seeing this in their culture. This is just more patriarchal BS disguised as progressive female empowerment.
Instead, why not allow women to have multiple partners? Having larger family units would provide more resources for taking care of the children, taking the burden of that off the women. Even if the material wealth is distributed upon death to the state, you need community to raise children. The bigger the community, the easier it is to raise kids. So, having some kind of larger marriage groups would really make a whole lot more sense than progressing from one monogamous relationship to the next (but maybe that’s as far as the heteronormative imagination went?).
The discussion about sex was kind of didactic, but it was done in passing and poorly, and I don’t understand what it’s supposed to set up since we can just assume the standards for Jade when it comes to sex mirror what we already know? Because she’s from Earth? Also, it’s not like the expectations around sex are THAT different for Theo or the Clecanians?
And then he gets to have emotionally connected sex for the first time ever (face to face) and it just gets glossed over rather than genuinely explored? That is just unfair in the highest degree. The sex in general is quite uninteresting and very snooze fest-y.
The characterisation was all over the place.
Overall, I like the rough and tumble kind of MMC that isn’t afraid of a little manhandling, however the effect this society deeming Theo such an uggo and still forcing him to be paraded out every year is really glossed over in favour of just loosely linking his aggression to how this society treats him. Jade is also very wishy-washy, pushing people easily away as who she was before, yet just accepting Theo as “grumpy” even though she doesn’t really know him at all, and he’s being very physical with her.
There’s also a lot of pop culture references, and that thing I can’t stand where the FMC has “seen it in sci-fi and knew what it had to be” – is it supposed to be meta? It’s so circular, the FMC knowing it because it appeared in fiction back home, but now it’s also appearing in fiction that is her reality… We can just not do this, mkay? Throw it out. Right along with “not in Kansas anymore”, yeah?
Overall the author seems aware of the genre this book is in and that there are tropes in this book, but reluctant to do much with them. Do people not know that it’s okay to cut out worldbuilding that doesn’t interest you as a writer? The relationship can carry the story if you let it.
In the end, I read the ending twice, because I blanked out on it the first time. But even so, I don’t remember how it ended. After that whole story it just kind of… was over.
And that’s really the ultimate judgment here – it was okay. Serviceable. Forgettable. There are good bones here, but the execution is sloppy, the double standards are frustrating, and the info dumps make it a slog to get through.
If you’re desperate for alien romance and can overlook some problematic beauty standards and heavy-handed exposition, you might enjoy it. But there are better books in this genre that handle these themes with more skill and less hypocrisy.
“When Sasha Barrett gets bitten by a snake on a mission, her squad captain’s quick actions not only save her life, but also make her realise something she may have known all along…“
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