THIS BOOK IS JUST 😭😭😭

I’m serious, that’s the majority of my notes, weeping faces at Zylar being adorable.

So I wrote some mild criticisms to start with in my initial rave. Admittedly, Strange Love is not perfect despite my five stars and its permanent place in my romance hall of fame. I mean, what even is the plot? The Hunger Games because Reasons? What is the worldbuilding? The author binges every David Attenborough nature show ever made and then just montages plausible nature facts onto the page? Is it wrong to love this intuitive methodology so much, and would Ann Aguirre perhaps like company for any of her future Attenborough binges with a fellow superfan? Just saying, I am available for a Netflix Teleparty on David Attenborough related productions.

Now for some more lucid thoughts. I read this book in January sometime, and then wound up rereading it entirely in March for a group buddy read. It’s not exactly the type of novel that requires a thorough rereading, but damn was it ever enjoyable the second time around, like wrapping yourself in your favourite alien-print blanket for an afternoon nap.

I think what impresses me the most about this book is that the way it’s constructed fights against many of my reader preferences. Yet in this instance, it gels perfectly to create this magical reading experience? Aguirre writes with these really short beats of action interspersed with zippy one-liners, which is a pattern I don’t find myself naturally inclined towards. Her characters are wonderful but it’s not like we spend much time actually developing them in depth. Zylar is alien and a sweetheart. Beryl is charmingly average and relatable, and that’s kind of it – yet it’s perfectly enough for the lighthearted story. The hero Zylar’s sad family life is hinted at in the couple’s interactions with his hardass (hard-shelled, too!) matriarchal mother and his complete tool of a brother. Beryl spends, like, half a page tops pining for her life on earth before she’s completely over it and excited about an alien HEA. The events of the plot seem somewhat capriciously structured just to have more external conflict.

It’s a bit interesting to compare these tendencies to another example of Aguirre’s writing in which they just don’t seem to work as well. Shortly after this re-read, I joined a buddy-read for Aguirre’s paranomormal series The Leopard King. Aguirre’s whole thing seems to be reinventing tropes certain readers wouldn’t find appealing – Omegaverse-adjacent shifter romance, in this case, usually about alpha dudes – and recasting it in a vein that’s appealing to progressively-minded readers. In The Leopard King’s case, she makes the shifting/imprinting thing both consensual and also slightly femdom. Even so, I wound up DNF-ing at 70% because it was so extremely not working for me. The Leopard King is also fast-paced with a lack of character development and an infodumpy plot that seems to happen because Reasons. At 70% there’s a natural disaster and I found I couldn’t push through the whole “finding everyone, making sure they’re ok, and reunion sex” final act.

Even so, I found the premise of Leopard King intriguing. It’s about a woman who’s always felt like second or maybe fifteenth best in her clan, in a relationship of convenience with her deceased best friend’s widow, who is still grieving his wife. The way their relationship was navigated, with a surprising amount of emotional nuance, did move me. I wished that less time had been spent on shapeshifter territorial politics, more time spent working through how it feels to grieve someone yet also want to bang their former best friend/spouse and find them incredibly hot even though you’d always though they were average in looks, yet also to want to make that person feel cherished and not like a relationship runner-up. Because that’s kind of a recognizable situation, in a strange way? Grief and moving on and libido can be weird. It seemed like that book contained emotional honesty about a type of second chance relationship at its core, while all the external conflict in the shapeshifter world kind of distracted from pursuit of that.

In Strange Love, Aguirre finds this balance between external conflict – which she seems to really love doling out, even if the stakes sometimes feel inexplicably light for matters that should be life-and-death – and a tender-hearted, domestic love. Which became the only thing that mattered to me, while the realism and depth of the world just didn’t matter to me because it didn’t seem to be where the book’s heart was at. As I progressed through the story, I just kind of accepted that Beryl was going to stomp the competition in the random Hunger Games for Reproductive Rights challenge, because her relevant background as Sunshine Angels Daycare worker would give her an advantage, which is both logical and funny. I also accepted that the narrative gaze wasn’t going to linger too long on anything upsetting, even the death of her best friend’s would-be spouse. Or, uh, the eventual murder plot enacted for revenge on this death. Like, the book is actually very murdery, but I somehow found the tone in which this was conveyed not realistic enough for it to come across as traumatic? There’s just enough lightness and distance that I didn’t get too bogged down in it.

The book leans heavily into the inherent comedy of “two beings who literally don’t understand each other are in forced proximity.” However, it goes about this in such a gentle-hearted way that totally subverts expectations about how we anticipate a forced-proximity story about a supertall, superstrong alien and a regular human woman would play out. Because, all external factors aside, Beryl and Zylar are super compatible. The novel, of course, begins with accidental alien kidnapping. But Zylar, bless him, would never do this intentionally. There are Plot Reasons this happens out of his control, which set up the eventual sequel. Beryl, of course, thinks all the tropey thoughts we would expect from this situation, like whether Zylar is going to probe her butt. (He does not. She, to my great delight, eventually probes him, and I’m only surprised Aguirre refrained from making an In Soviet Russia joke about this).

Zylar’s inner monologue is initially about how bizarre he finds Beryl. She is terrifying – baring her teeth in fearsome smiles – and odd-looking, with fur on her head and eyebrows that move about unpredictably. In alien culture, of course, terror is an asset, and so Zylar’s compliments are all like, “You are the most terrible being I have ever beheld; your fearsomeness will drive away all predators from our nest, and you will attain a high rank through your capacity for loud noises.” Because Beryl is a very nice person, she explains to him eventually that this doesn’t come across as complimentary. Which is adorable. I just loved their whole dynamic of good intentions gone horribly awry in communication, then working out the sentiment intended to arrive at an understanding. “POV character doesn’t know what TF is going on” is one of my favourite devices ever and we get tons of mileage out of it.

Very eventually, we get around to some mindblowingly good human/alien sex. There’s something so incredibly moving about the risk this involved on the author’s part, about the emotional tenderness and consideration with which this sex is negotiated. Aguirre says in her acknowledgements that she had this idea after googling “cave insects with sex-reversed genitals.” And so, because Beryl and Zylar can’t bang in the usual way, sex is this exploration for them both, focused upon what feels good, even if it’s a bit alien for both. Beryl teases the webbing between Zylar’s appendages, which, like, practically incapacitates him with pleasure; it’s fucking adorable. Eventually she reaches into his thorax and fingerbangs his organ that makes spermatophores. These scenes are mostly written from Zylar’s point of view, and so we know how vulnerable this feels, how he’s so overcome with sensation that no one else has made him feel before. He’s an alien virgin hero who never expected to win a partner on his own merits, and that is a sentiment that translates surprisingly well to our world. But it’s also about the particularity of Beryl’s hands doing what they can do, which alien claws never could, and about Beryl using Zylar’s body for her own pleasure in a way that she couldn’t interact with a human man. After Zylar and Beryl explore genital-to-thorax intimacy, Zylar tells her that he thinks their fluids are “reactive,” and when combined form a “powerful sexual accelerant.” It’s probably bad science but it’s great allegory – this is really about the desire they make together, particular to who they are and their knowledge of each other’s bodies. It has nothing to do with any traditional markers of human desirability. And it’s so incredibly hot. The first time I read the book I was like, “how on earth is this so hot,” and the second time I was just giddy over it all.

But maybe my favourite sex scene of all is the final one. To contextualize this, I loved the resolution to the Hunger Games plot, which ends in a successful failure I find more satisfying than outright success. Beryl and Zylar are disqualified because Beryl’s dog jumps into the ring to help her out, as he believes her life is in danger. Unable to explain the concept of dog loyalty to an unsympathetic crowd of alien bureaucrats, Zylar and Beryl are allowed to live but exiled to the primitive hinterlands. These are much more earthlike than the refined city, in that one must eat food that doesn’t come out of a Star Trek replicator, and one must bathe in a thing resembling an earthly bathtub instead of a space-age steam-cleaner. Beryl is thrilled. And so she and Zylar are settling into their alien hipster farmer lifestyle and decide to christen their new home with sex in their alien-human sex hammock which she designed and he had made. Zylar shows her these claw-covers he’s had made, which function sort of like a dildo. And then.

He uses them on himself. We conclude with a wank scene as the pinnacle of sexual interaction between hero and heroine. And Beryl is so happy for him, so turned on by his being turned-on, by watching him. And it’s so emotional, because Zylar’s whole journey through this book has been about loving and valuing himself, and believing that he is lovable and valuable because Beryl, and no one else, sees that in him. Gah, my heart.

So a character arc of self-love concludes perfectly, with a scene of self-love. Bless.

Review originally published on Goodreads on August 9, 2022