I don’t often read Alien Romance, because it tends to be a lot simpler than my fave subgenre of Space Opera Romance. But every once in a while I’m in the mood for a quick, escapist happily-ever-after. I picked Arterek up this time around because it’s a retelling of one of my childhood favourites: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It was one of those classic 50’s movies that romanticized pioneer life. And when I was eight, I was OBSESSED.
In the movie, hardworking pioneer woman Milly agrees to marry rugged homesteader Adam. Milly is excited to finally keep her own little cottage and cook for just one man instead of slaving away at the boardinghouse where she’s been working to feed gaggles of hungry, mannerless cowboys. But when she arrives at Adam’s homestead, she finds that he’s neglected to mention she’ll be keeping house for not just herself and Adam, but also his six brothers.
Despite the tension this revelation causes between Milly and Adam, they eventually fall in love. Millie whips the rundown homestead into shape and teaches the brothers to behave like gentlemen. She even reads them her favourite romance novel. But she doesn’t realize that the backwoods brothers are going to take the story as serious romance advice. Just like the men in the book, the brothers go to the village and kidnap the women they want for wives.
This movie has all the tropes that are popular in alien romance:
-Men who just want to find and please a mate
-Inter-cultural miscommunication
-Insta attraction
-Kidnapping made sexy instead of scary
-Multiple couples with multiple love stories
Replace the unruly cowboys with gruff alien veterans of a galactic war, add a few bedroom scenes with extra-interesting appendages, and you’ve got yourself a perfect alien romance series.
But not every author could pull it off as well as Honey Phillips does in Artek, the first of her Seven Brides for Seven Alien Brothers series.
For an alien romance series to work, the movie plot has to be cut up so that each couple has their own individual book with its own separate romance arc. Artek only covers the romance between Millie (named Nelly in this retelling) and Adam (Artek).
It’s easy to imagine their story on its own could be boring. But Phillips manages to make this a page-turner by including lots of spice as the newlyweds explore their inter-species bedroom capabilities, and plenty of cozy moments as Nelly develops friendships with the brothers and they all work together to restore the ranch house. She also modernizes the plot just a touch to ease some annoyances about gender inequality that might otherwise take modern readers out of the story, while still keeping the fun cowboy vibe.
This cozy, sexy quick-read also does the thing I appreciate most about alien romances–I call it the “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” effect after the retro self-help book. When an alien romance takes the mundane and often frustrating miscommunications most couples experience, and makes it about aliens and humans who love each other trying to communicate across cultural barriers, it reminds couples that our real-life arguments are often less a matter of who is right and who is wrong or our spouses being assholes, and are more often just miscommunications between people with different personalities and ways of thinking. Behind the miscommunications, there’s so much love.
With its simple, straightforward prose and small-scale plot, this book is not going to become your new favourite high-stakes space opera. But Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: Artek’s much-needed reminders of the love behind the miscommunication, its supremely cozy vibe, and its bounty of spicy scenes to get the blood flowing, I recommend this as the perfect one-day read for a rainy weekend getaway with your sweetheart.
And bonus, if you end up enjoying Artek, you’ll have the rest of the series with all its romance potential to look forward to, or to binge, since it’s a completed package. I’d definitely go for another one…or six of these!
