Review: Earth In-Laws are Wary by Lyn Gala (Earth Fathers Book 3)
Max and Rick are travelling space with three children and one human friend they’ve promised to take home. They’ve overcome language barriers, confused surrogacy contracts and attacks from hostile aliens. And that includes political attacks and prejudice in addition to pirates boarding their spaceship.
But now the children want to see their home planet and Rick is getting stranger every second they draw near the Hidden world. Max knows his belchy husband well enough to know something is wrong, but nothing would prepare him for the political and familial disaster waiting for them. This time, circumstances may pull their little family apart at the seams.
Review:
Dear Lyn Gala,
The usual disclaimer to me reading this series applies. The only reason I am reading a series with male pregnancy in it is because there is your name on the cover and because the actual male pregnancy happened in book one and book two and book three spared me from another vision of little octopus like looking beings popping out of a male body. At some point in this book Rick suggests thinking about the new generation of the kids they may produce and all I could think about was please no, because I am going to run away screaming if that event takes place again :). I am joking obviously, a writer decides what they want to write and a reader decides whether they will like the topic or not.
However, since Rick and Max’s kids are now teenagers in Hidden Ones years I certainly enjoyed watching this family going through growing pains. As always communication and miscommunication between different species are explored, often in an amusing way. I also always enjoy how this author often explores social issues familiar to us in her books about aliens, but looks at it from a different angle because those are aliens who behave like that.
For example, Rick’s people insist on allowing their off spring full freedom to choose what they want to do and how they want to do it. It is usually a very wrong thing to insist that kids would be the exact copy of their parents; they must be allowed to choose their own way. Max though, who is a human parent is much more protective of their kids and would have hovered over them a lot if allowed. That mini conflict was interesting by itself, but it is not as if some human parents do not parent like Rick tries to do. I am not judging whether it is a good or a bad thing. Rick clearly loves his kids a lot, too.
I found this book more tense than the second story. I was not bored while reading either. It is not as if I thought that they will die, but there was a moment in the story where I did worry about their well being. I also appreciated a somewhat darker turn the book made close to the end (all main characters are fine, do not worry) and a little bit of melancholy at the end.
Grade: B
AmazonBNKoboBook DepositoryGoogle
Leave a Reply