I picked this up on a whim out of my TBR pile. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't a sci-fi novel featuring aliens from a different plane of existence. Despite my lukewarm feelings about the premise in the beginning, I admit the story sucked me in the more I read. I enjoyed the world-building. Frank's description of Beneath and the creatures that inhabit it were well done. I also enjoyed Julian. Though it was hard to take his actions in the beginning, I think Frank did a fairly credible job of redeeming him.

Asia was harder to take. Although I understood her actions in the beginning (if I'd been kidnapped I image I'd have tried to escape/flout authority, too) they became increasingly hard to excuse away as the novel progressed. Though even that isn't my main issue. My main issue was her insistence that she "wasn't made for forevers and happily ever afters". That's it. That was all the resistance between her and Julian. It wasn't the fact that she was from Earth and he wasn't, or that he brought her to his world without her permission, or that his people needed her to feed them energy, all of which I could have understood. Instead it was just "eh, I'm not a HEA type of girl".

Beyond that, there were several holes in the plot. The idea that Julian and Asia had to have sex in order to feed his people energy was somewhat outlandish, but so was the rest of the plot, so I could set that aside. It was harder to set aside disbelief over other things, such as the way Julian and Asia constantly fought with each other which hampered the progress of the romance.

Having said that, I'm willing to cut the novel a little slack because it's the first of a new series. I did enjoy the world enough that I plan to read the next entry, Stealing Kathryn.