Bonded to the Stryxian by Ella Blake
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Humans made a deal with the Stryxian males: Help us defend Earth, and when the war is over, we’ll send you women to help rebuild your dying species. Now, the war appears to be over and Trinity Bentzer’s number has been called in the lottery. Only, instead of winning a boatload of money, she’s getting some badass winged alien she’s never met. Trin’s not thrilled to be shipped off and matched up, until she meets Raig. Maybe she hit the jackpot, after all.
Bonded to the Stryxian
Commander Raig Thanor’s job is to supervise the females’ move to their holding chambers until they are sent to their final matches, but the moment he meets Trinity, he knows she’s his. If only claiming her didn’t risk sparking a war within his own people.
Audiobook with a novella included!
The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💙🖤💚❤️
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌍🌏
Character development: 😠😘🤓🥰
Narrator(s): 🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration Type: Dual Narration
The heroine: Trinity Bentzer – when the alien Morr’ta attacked Earth, all was thought to be lost before an alliance between humans and the stryxians was brokered. The stryxian race was dying due to low birth rates and hardly any females being born. The leaders of Earth told them that for helping defeat the Morr’ta, they would hold a lottery and human females whose number came up would be mated to stryxian males. Trinity was a war veteran and was being retired since the war was over, when her number comes up in the lottery.
The Hero: Commander Raig Thanor – He is a stryxian and was the leader of the stryxian warrior force during the war. He is now in charge of helping out the human females until they are sent to one of the stryxian settlements to be mated. However, as soon as he sees Trinity, he knows she is his fated mate. Stryxians were seven foot tall and muscular and easy on the eyes. They had fine scales on their skin and had thick leathery wings, and their eyes were mostly black.
The Story: Trinity has chronic pain and a limp from a war wound, which she is a bit self conscious about. Especially since she got the wound on the one mission she botched and which she considered her greatest failure. She planned to move to a quiet rural place, not wanting to head to a city where she felt she would have to try to hide her limp which caused her more pain.
Trinity was surprised to not only find that her number came up, but to find that she was going to the outer zone of the galaxy and her military superiors wanted her to spy for them since humans had not been allowed to the zone on the edge of Morr’ta territory. She didn’t want to do it, but was given no choice. Though Raig knew immediately she was his even though he would be going against Stryxia’s rulers by claiming her.
I liked this book because Trinity was a strong female heroine yet she was vulnerable as well. Raig was a bit misogynistic at first and didn’t like humans all that well either. Although he was certainly an interesting character. The story was good as well. I liked the fact that it differed from a lot of other alien romance stories. Firstly in the fact that the stryxians needed females not because of a virus, but because of low birth rates, and that Earth had an abundance of females due to the war.
This book is told in dual points of view via dual narration and was narrated by Elle Sonali and Zachary Johnson. Zachary has a deep voice which is perfect for the 7 foot tall muscular alien. I really hate it when they have a male narrator with a weak or high voice when the male character wouldn’t fit that voice at all. Elle has a clear, yet feminine voice which matched Trinity perfectly as well.
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