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psocopteraAmbassador, by William Alexander, is middle-grade science fiction about a kid chosen to become the planetary ambassador for Earth, while also finding out his parents are undocumented. So, "two sets of alien problems". I liked this a lot - it reminded me a lot of Interstellar Pig, a favorite SF book of mine when I was a kid in the 80s. The ending leaves a lot of room for a sequel and I'll be eager to read one if it happens.
Proof by Seduction, Courtney Milan. Yeah, I've gotten to the point in my Milan fandom where I'm reading her whole back catalog. This was her first novel and I can see where it's not quite as strong as her later work - the female secondary characters seem particularly thinly drawn (although one of them we do see just enough of to be intriguing, which is good because she's starring in the next book in the series, with a male secondary character here who I can't wait to read more about) - but it's already far more enjoyable than the average romance novel one might happen to pick up. One of the things I really like about Milan is that she very much gives us a lot of the trappings of the historical setting, but very contemporary values - I think that would be a weakness in realistic historical fiction but it's absolutely what I want in my genre romance. In another romance novel, the "problem" of the heroine's humble/unknown origins might be solved with a surprise!aristocratic pedigree when the hero investigates her background, but instead he just chews out her old headmistress for being cruel to her and uses his position in society to squash questions about her family. I just really liked that Milan rejected the cliche of the main characters having to actually somehow have noble blood to be worthy of each other even if one of them thought they had fallen for a commoner.
Proof by Seduction, Courtney Milan. Yeah, I've gotten to the point in my Milan fandom where I'm reading her whole back catalog. This was her first novel and I can see where it's not quite as strong as her later work - the female secondary characters seem particularly thinly drawn (although one of them we do see just enough of to be intriguing, which is good because she's starring in the next book in the series, with a male secondary character here who I can't wait to read more about) - but it's already far more enjoyable than the average romance novel one might happen to pick up. One of the things I really like about Milan is that she very much gives us a lot of the trappings of the historical setting, but very contemporary values - I think that would be a weakness in realistic historical fiction but it's absolutely what I want in my genre romance. In another romance novel, the "problem" of the heroine's humble/unknown origins might be solved with a surprise!aristocratic pedigree when the hero investigates her background, but instead he just chews out her old headmistress for being cruel to her and uses his position in society to squash questions about her family. I just really liked that Milan rejected the cliche of the main characters having to actually somehow have noble blood to be worthy of each other even if one of them thought they had fallen for a commoner.
