Jenny Schwartz‘s Adventures of a Xeno-Archaeologist series ends up a mostly solid sci-fi adventure that inexplicably suffers from a shotgun romance. I can’t for the life of me understand how anyone could think spilling all your darkest secrets to someone on your second meeting, followed by them immediately discarding all their responsibilities in response to declare their unconditional devotion, is a believable (or, hell, even desirable) scenario.
Why not just… have them be previous acquaintances? Her former husband was a fighter pilot in the same force! The two could’ve easily been set up to have a plausible connection and it’s just beyond baffling that the author went with this not quite love at first sight situation instead. That aside though, yeah, it’s a pretty fun series.
The Metaworld Chronicles novels, by David J. Wuto, have a number of interesting aspects: A surprisingly dynamic modified version of D&D/Pathfinder‘s magic system, being set in an urban fantasy version of Oceania and Shanghai, and a curious mixture of altruism and coldbloodedness in its character dynamics.
I’m certainly less than thrilled about how long the author’s been dragging out this university arc (which, primarily, seems to be an excuse to dump loads of worldbuilding exposition in the guise of lectures), but aside from that the only thing I can complain about is how after the action switches to China everyone spontaneously forgets the protagonist’s been named heir of her maternal grandfather’s family line. Like, it seems like that would’ve been a hard counter to all the inheritance drama.