DNF: Alien Prince’s Mate (Fated Mates of the Seed #1)

by Tammy Walsh

Rating: ⭐1.5/5⭐

Claim. Mate. Breed.

After human females are no longer capable of becoming pregnant, I enter a program to be seeded by an alien male…

But when the facility is attacked, I discover my mate is none other than Ezal, a powerful alien prince and heir to the Krev throne.

I rebel against his tyrannical rules but he’s determined to protect and seed me, no matter the cost. And when I discover he’s tormented by inner demons and consumed by the need to control, we embark on a passionate love affair.

When he touches me, I yearn for more.

When he kisses me, I surrender in gratitude.

When he undresses me, I ache to scream his name.

And when he makes me fly, I soar higher than ever before.

When Ezal warns me to keep my distance, it only makes me want him more. I discover my true desires, as well as the dark secrets he keeps hidden away from prying eyes…

Review

Hello and welcome to my first DNF of 2024!

Alien Prince’s Mate was a fairly short book and I really did try to hang in there to the bitter end, but after nearly a week of struggling with it, I had to throw in the towel.

First of all, the dude was supposed to have blue skin, so what’s up with that cover? Who is that guy supposed to be, huh?

Aside from that pointless observation, my biggest issue with Alien Prince’s Mate was simply how badly written it was. As someone who spent a good chunk of her teenage years diving through Twilight, The Hunger Games and Harry Potter fanfiction, I have quite high tolerance for crappy prose. But it’s one thing for amateur, editor-less fans—who just write for fun—to leave a lot to be desired when it comes to crafting a tale, and a much different thing when a person who’s charging for their work delivers a subpar product.

First and foremost, someone should get Tammy Walsh a synonyms dictionary so she can look up alternatives for the words said—and asked—to use for her dialogues:

“Think of it as a… break,” I said. “Go away for a week, get pregnant, and come back. I know some couples do that.”

“And some break up because of it,” Holly said. “It’s not worth the risk.”

“Having a baby isn’t worth it?” I said, half in jest. “Having a baby is everything. It’s what we as women were made for.”

And while we’re on the subject, I found the idea that women solely exist to have babies to be ridiculously antiquated and disgustingly misogynistic.

Would I be forced to return to Earth? Forced to live a lonely and pointless life without a child?

I don’t much care for modern day feminism, as it often brushes on misandry, but to say that women have little value except as vessels for reproduction and that a childless life is empty and pointless? That’s reprehensible to me. Made even worse by presenting rape as an acceptable form to get a woman pregnant:

“Come with me,” I said. “Come with me and get pregnant. Maybe there’s something you can take that will make you fall asleep, make you forget everything that happens. If you can’t remember that it happened, then it’s like it didn’t really happen at all, right?”

How a female author could actually write that passage I’ll never know.

Another thing I found irritating was the excessive use of exclamation marks; it made the story feel so very juvenile.

My excitement grew to new lengths (literally) and I pressed my elbow to my groin in a vain attempt to quell it. The pressure only went to make it worse!

If you’ve ever fallen down the rabbit hole that are fanfiction sites, you may have come across the term crack!fic, which is basically a tag used for unserious, comedic, silly, often satirical stories. And, even though I don’t often venture into the fated-mates-with-aliens side of romance, over the years I’ve managed to read my fair share of them (Leigh Wyndfield is one of my go-to authors when I’m in the mood for sci-fi smut), so I know there are good stories out there.

But let’s pause for a second and just picture the scene described above. Conjure it in your mind’s eye: sitting on a couch across from a ~~man~~ male alien that’s supposed to be all dreamy and gorgeous, having a conversation, and him suddenly contorting himself to press his elbow to his dick. Wouldn’t you find that incredibly odd and suspicious? Is it even possible to do that inconspicuously?

Of course, this book also had to break the cardinal rule of romance everywhere and have the characters uttering that big four-letter word within the first 24 hours of having met each other. Because what’s one more sin at this point, right?

Other demerits included:

The author getting the names of her characters mixed up, even though there were barely a handful of them.
An obscene amount of ill-timed exclamation marks, particularly during spicy scenes, and how uncomfortably childish they made the whole thing feel—exclamation marks should be kept to a minimum in the best of cases, but they really have no business invading smut.
Roxy’s “woe is me, I’m not as physically attractive as the other aliens” annoying and immature whining and her sheer self-centeredness:

Why did this attack need to happen now? I wondered. Couldn’t the natives wait until after I’d been impregnated? Was it such a crime to finally get something I wanted?

And idiocy:

“We’re under attack but let me throw a tantrum and refuse to move unless you first explain the reason there’s conflict on this planet and why an attack might be taking place”. Followed by:

Had I cost us valuable minutes that prevented us from having already escaped?

The sheer number of times the word “seed” was used. It ended up grossing me out.
How after all the buildup, the smut wasn’t even any good. It was very utilitarian and devoid of emotion: poundpound, gruntgrunt, done.
How the MMC and his guard had a full-on conversation about the FMC as if she wasn’t even there.

And keep in mind that I only made it to around 51% before DNFing.

On a lighter note, I came upon something that made me LOL and that I’d never seen before: “Jees”—yes, with a capital J—used as an alternative (inexistent, according to the Oxford dictionary) spelling for jeez.

And if someone’s read this and figured out what that “Shyat” thing was, let me know, because it kept being brought up and sometimes it was used as a synonym for libido, while at other times it was hinted to be something like a separate consciousness inhabiting the same body as the person, and it just made things unnecessarily muddy.

In the end, this book ended up being simultaneously preachy and cheesy in its own unique and cringe way that had me constantly fighting the urge to roll my eyes—I can’t imagine how that’d be a response anyone would want to elicit. The idea wasn’t terrible on its own, it was just dismally executed.