Review: The ET Guy by VC Lancaster

Item: The E.T. Guy (Office Aliens, #1)
Rating: 3
Author: Kate

Posted December 11, 2019 by Kate

Check out on Goodreads | Buy on Amazon
Genres: Adult, Contemporary Romance
Also by this author: The New Guy (Office Aliens, #2), The Security Guy (Office Aliens #3)
Series: Office Aliens #1
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Source: Kindle Unlimited

It's 2266, and Lois Kennedy is an Intake Officer for DETI, the Department of Extra-Terrestrial Immigration.
Zir is a refugee from the planet Teiss, working in DETI's I.T. department.
Lois and Zir just can't get along. As far as she's concerned, he's rude, abrasive, and condescending. She wants nothing to do with him. So why does he never leave her alone? He must be crazy if he thinks there could ever be anything between them... right?

Hello, hello! This is Kate, reporting live and somewhat muffled from under the torrential downpour of books she needs to read in December! If you look hard, you can see my hand, sticking out from the pile, waving.

*waves*

I have participated in the Romance Roundabout Reading Challenge for three years now, and I’ve loved it every year. The year-long reading challenge was previously hosted by Under the Covers Book Blog, but they chose not to host it this year in favor of a new year-long challenge, in which I am also participating. As a brief overview, the Romance Roundabout challenge, in which I am participating just for fun, by myself, this year, gives you 13 romance subcategories, and you can choose to read 1, 3 or 5 books per category. Me, being an overachiever, is reading five, and I always struggle with the sci-fi section. Unless Ilona Andrews is having a new release coming out, I’m usually shit out of luck. There I am, staring down the barrel at less than a month left in the year and I have (among other categories), three sci-fi romances to read!

Luckily, I turned to Suzanne from Under the Covers and she was quite helpful. She’s a self-confessed alien obsessor and thinks the weirder, the better. So of course I knew she’d have some great alien recommendations, and her plentiful blog posts and BookTube videos did not disappoint. (Please poke around their site: it’s so well done. These ladies are insane and the best book bloggers to look up to and follow).

This Office Aliens series initially appealed because it’s pitched as a contemporary romance… except the main characters are from another planet. Me, not truly being in the mood for real, hard-hitting science fiction, jumped on that train and I think I’ll ride it out with all four books available on Kindle Unlimited (at the time of posting). I actually thoroughly enjoyed this read. It was fairly light and breezy, so I read it in one sitting. A very quick read! It features Lois, who works in the Department of Extra-Terrestrial Immigration in 2266, in the Intake department. She works as an orientation leader with refugees from the planet Teiss after their planet was invaded and overrun, and manages all their paperwork to make new lives on Earth. But her frequent computer problems means that she’s constantly requiring assistance from a surly IT technician, and alien, who can’t seem to stand to look at her.

His Earth name is Zir, and it turns out, she was completely off base about him.

“You should sit and allow me to provide for you. If my offerings please you, then if you were Volin, we would mate. But you are human, so it is much, much more complicated,” Zir grumbled.

She thought they hated each other, but really it couldn’t be further from the truth. At least for him. Zir was… an interesting and adorable dichotomy. He was a warrior, from a race where the male’s place was to protect and provide for the woman. But he was also excruciatingly shy, a bit nervous, and very grumpy. It was cute! Frankly, he was adorable. He rented a book called “101 Dates” so he could come up with ideas, looked up recipes that both Lois and his alien palette could enjoy. He prepared him home so it would be suitable for a human, too. He did everything right… except tell Lois. Zir’s race, the Volin, do courtships very differently, and he was quite thrown when Lois didn’t want to immediately become his mate, “dating” need not apply for him.

He’d essentially been training himself to be able to best the challenge of “winning” Lois over as a mate, but as a human, she really just wanted someone she could spend time with and enjoy. This was a romantic exploration I was here for in a big way. Lois herself was a very pragmatic, independent woman who spent a lot of time being patiently exasperated. She’d been dating around a lot and for a long time looking for someone to spend her life with but was completely thrown when Zir proposed that he be that person. Her reaction… poor Zir. The woman does not pull punches. They’d been working together, yes, but had no flirtation between them, so she was understandably taken aback.

Related Post: Rock Hard by Nalini Singh – an office romance

The book was absolutely entertaining. It made me laugh, the one-liners were truly the height of sarcastic humor, and I was there for this romance. But the only problem is… the romance. They didn’t have a whole lot of chemistry. It could have been a lot of things: Lois was a bit too pragmatic, and I didn’t really believe that it was love. It could have been the way that the book outlined their courtship but skipped over the part where they dated for a while. It could have been that Zir was a bit… removed. I believed that they liked each other quite a lot, but I couldn’t help but feel that they were missing a certain… something.

That said, I do recommend it, especially if you have a Kindle Unlimited membership and you’re looking for a quick read to pass the time. It wasn’t a very deep read, but it was highly entertaining, especially with this alien that was barely humanoid. It reads more like a contemporary romance, with a workplace relationship which you KNOW I love, and less like a space-age novel. So if you’re looking at this one but not sold on the “science fiction” part of the “science-fiction romance,” focus on the “romance” aspect. Read my review of book two…