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With a little bit of free reign and wanting to try to pick up a lot of paranormal and sci-fi romances throughout the rest of the year (to fill up some bonus prompts for my year end brackets), I decided to finally pick up In the Arms of an Android. This is the first book of Tracy Lauren's Android series. I was able to use this book to cover the Heaving Bosom's Reading Embrace prompt Jimmi Simpson's Robot Adventure, the Fall in Love prompt Photo Cover and Color Me Romantic prompt for Silver (story with travel).
Valens and his friends are out on an exploratory mission after he finds a ping in his scans. Being an android, he is the only one allowed off the ship to explore the new planet and try to find the source of the signal. When he finally finds it, it looks like an old cryo-chamber. When he opens it up, he finds Andrea. She is just starting to wake up. Once he can get her out of the chamber and back to his ship, they learn the truth. Andrea was kidnapped by a crazy billionaire and sent out to make 2nd contact almost 2,000 years ago. She has to struggle to find a new place in this new life and leans on Valens for support. He starts to feel protective over Andrea, especially when fellow androids start realizing he's feeling emotions that have escaped most of the rest of the them.
I've read cyborg romances before, but I think this is my first full android. I wasn't quite sure how "robot" he'd feel going in and thought it was a really done well. I could believe when he was confused by some things, but starting to understand emotions. Now, they are not 100% like we expect from a robot, but also a lot more advanced. There's discussion about how he has a more advanced learning and computing system (even more than the technology he uses) and it grows and adapts as he learns. I thought it was really interesting how it worked so that it felt natural that he was learning to feel emotions and not a "sudden miracle." It also helped that while he wasn't in love beforehand, he did experience some of the more shallower emotions for his friends and himself.
Now, this wasn't quite a full 5-stars for me for a couple of reasons. The biggest was Andrea. It felt like Tracy was torn in how to balance which direction she wanted to take her. At first there was a lot going on with Andrea, as to be expected, with night terrors and being scared around the other alien species and just dealing with her new situation. She definitely like imprinted on Valens, so I wasn't sure how much was actually love and not dependence on him. Now it could be both, but she went from dealing with all these issues to I'm 90% fine. I just wished that either there was more working through those feelings or even a time jump instead of just a flip being switched. I also wanted there to be more to what happens with the other androids. There could've been more pages to really delve into the issues and what the other androids were wanting to learn. It just felt really quick and then was resolved quickly as well.
It was a great start, but I could tell that this was an earlier work of Tracy's. I'm super excited to have finally read one of her sci-fi books and will definitely continue my way through her backlist while I wait for new books. This was great for my first android and I'm excited to see how it'll continue in the series. If you are looking for a sci-fi romance with an android and not necessarily an "alien," this would be a great option; even more so if you're interested in getting into Sci-Fi romance.
Have you read In the Arms of an Android?
Bookishly Yours,
Stasi🍎
STATISTICS: In the Arms of an Android, Tracy Lauren, 4-stars, 0 days, eBook, 184 pages, published in 2019, indie published
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