Touched by an Alien (Alien Novels, #1)

by Gini Koch

Sci-fi action meets steamy paranormal romance in Gini Koch’s Alien novels, as Katherine “Kitty” Katt faces off against aliens, conspiracies, and deadly secrets. • “Futuristic high-jinks and gripping adventure.” —RT Reviews 

Marketing manager Katherine "Kitty" Katt had just finished a day on jury duty. When she stepped out of the Pueblo Caliente courthouse, all she was thinking about was the work she had to get caught up on. Then her attention was caught by a fight between a couple that looked like it was about to turn ugly.

But ugly didn't even begin to cover it when the "man" suddenly transformed into a huge, winged monster right out of a grade Z science fiction movie and went on a deadly killing spree. In hindsight, Kitty realized she probably should have panicked and run screaming the way everyone around her was doing. Instead she sprinted into action to take down the alien.

In the middle of all the screeching and the ensuing chaos, a hunk in an Armani suit suddenly appeared beside her, introduced himself as Jeff Martini with "the agency," and then insisted on leading her to a nearby limo to talk to his "boss." And that was how Kitty's new life among the aliens began...

Touched by an Alien is the thrilling first installment of the Alien novels.

• ISBN10: 1101186321
• ISBN13: 9781101186329
• Publish Date: 1 April 2010
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Daw Books
• Format: eBook
• Pages: 400
• Language: English

Reviews

[nitzan_schwarz]

To read more reviews and fun things go to my blog; Drugs Called Books!

First read: May 28-29, 2012
Second read: May 31-June 1st, 2013

The Kitty Katt series are one of the funniest, funnest, most action packed and romance filled series out there... there is simply nothing not to love about it.
Highly recommended for Charlie Davidson (by Darynda Jones) fans, as it has the same kind of humor, kick butt heroine and sizzling romance.

"In real life, there are no superheroes.Of course, this doesn’t mean there are no superpowered beings.But never fear—I’m on it.Yeah, it doesn’t sound all that comforting to me, either."--Kitty.

The story is told from the POV of Kitty, a regular girl who gets sucked into the world of aliens and super-powered beings who want to wreck havoc and chaos of earth.
She is smart, clever, quick on her feet, funny, kind of dense at certain places, always ready to move and rather uncomfortable with doing nothing.
She is super funny and super awesome, though a fair warning: she is also slightly too perfect. It's not that as a character she is too perfect, because she has her bad traits, but in this book she is always right, always realizes the plan, always finds the mistakes others--much smarter others--have not notices, always makes the crazy plans that work remarkably well, even when logic says they probably shouldn't.
It makes her one kick-butt, awesome, strong character, but at this book it felt slightly too much. Don't worry, though, I can promise it gets better with the next books!

“My crazy's working a lot better than your sanity.” --Kitty

To read the full review go to my blog here!









Old review:

So, I both liked and hated this book. A weird combo, not necessarily a bad one.
Let's start - the beginning was horrible, not in the traditional way, but in a way that everything she described about the courthouse and her first superbeing should've been super action-y and cool but somehow, with the writing style, ended out as something kind of boring without an edge. It was something that on one hand described something full of action, but didn't feel like it at all – which bothered me. I was a bit afraid it will remain that way for the rest of the book—and perhaps it did, but I just got used to the style.
I found myself enjoying the conversations quite a bit. Love the snarky comments from Kitty and Christopher and Jeff's random marriage proposals, and I loved Jeff in general. I was really pissed about the whole Christopher-likes-her-too thingy, but was glad it didn't really interfere with Kitty and Jeff—there was never a real love triangle, which I was eternally grateful for.
Kitty's character was a bit difficult for me. Oh, I liked her plenty – badass woman, who somehow ends up saving all those aliens on more than one occasion and almost always has the right answer. Every feminist's dream. But that was just the problem with her – she was just a bit too perfect for my taste, enough to sometimes make me wonder if she herself was some sort of alien. Almost always calm, almost always find what those who've been dealing with the parasites for ages haven't, almost always with a plan—and her plans almost always—scratch that, always—work. She is a tid bit too perfect, it's almost like she was born for it all, and even if someone has the talent for all this things (not aliens things, just being in a special organization) I doubt that without training and proper education they'd be even close to the level of capability Kitty shows. Love that she's such a strong woman, but it is still a bit unreal to me.
I liked her relationship with Jeff—true, it took her full two days to fall in love with him, but it was still really sweet.
And Jamie. God, I loved Jamie. Truly disappointing that he's gay. Another awesome guy snatched to the other team. I swear, they take them all!
And I loved that it talked about Jews and the Holocaust and Nazi's and all that, and was pretty against it. I'm Jew (now, there, all people with prejudice, don't go hating on me, please. I get nervous easily). I wasn't expecting that from a popular series, and was thrilled to read about. I liked the message, it is such a good one. It's like telling people "don't be prejudice and hate the other for no reason other than his religion" but without getting their defenses up.
What sounded really far-fetched to me was the fact all planets had similar beliefs and religions. That sounds completely odd to me. Why would stars million light-years away have a similar opinion and story about life and the creation of it as we do? And it's not just the stars closer to us – those much farther away, like the Ancients', too. A bit hard to buy. I'd expect they'd have a completely different set of values, stories, beliefs and culture.
In conclusion; I wasn't the biggest fan in term of realism (yes, even fantasy books need to sound real, as odd as it may be) of the word Koch creates, and as much as I loved Kitty I couldn't relate to her in the way I could other characters, who sounded more real to me, but I did enjoy the story, the plot and the ideas.
I will keep reading this series. It's entertaining, fun and somewhat refreshing.

[celinenyx]

Touched by an Alien is my first encounter with science-fiction romance. Basically it's paranormal romance, only instead of a gang of hunky vampires, we have hunky aliens.

When Kitty walks out of the courthouse on a sunny day, she doesn't expect to see a man turn into an alien and shred his wife into pieces. Neither did she expect to kill said alien with an expensive Mont Blanc pen. Within moments she is led away by a gorgeous man in an Armani suit that claims to be part of an organisation trying to save the world from an alien invasion.

Touched by an Alien immediately hooked me. The story starts with immediate action, and it doesn't slow down after that. It's one long string of revelations, plot developments and snarky come-backs. Especially the snarkiness seems to be Kitty's speciality; I liked her for saying what was on her mind with no reserve. Too many books revolve around people keeping everything a secret - no such thing with Kitty. Even though she can get a bit annoying (she really likes to refer to big bad aliens as fuglies, and she seems to be incapable of being serious), I generally liked reading from her point of view.

The book started solid for me, and I was expecting this to be a four, maybe five star read. The further along I came in the book, the more annoyed I got and the rating started dropping. We get reveal after reveal after reveal and after a while I just wanted things to STAY LIKE THEY WERE. There is only so much you can understand in a story. You can't first give us a ton of world-building to remember, then every ten pages say "but that's not what's really going on!" and come up with something new. Another thing that bothered me was that ALL the revelations were made by Kitty. She helps people that have been doing their jobs for half their lives, and Miss Snappy comes in and solves everything in two days. You know, it's fine to have someone else come up with something sometimes too.

The worst thing about Touched by an Alien for me was the religious references and the sexism/slut-shaming. Basically, a group of good aliens has been exiled from their planet because of their religion. Kitty then makes the reference of them being like the Jews and the Holocaust. HOW?! Did they get chopped to pieces? Did they get experimented on as if they were even less than animals? Were they tortured, burnt, hit, starved, and denigrated? Did they put millions of aliens in ovens or gas chambers? No? THEN IT'S NOT LIKE THE FRIGGING HOLOCAUST. I think the word Ms Koch was looking for is "diaspora", which in this case means the shattering of the Jews across the world because they couldn't stay in their homeland. THAT'S the correct comparison. Comparing exile with the Holocaust is offensive and not a correct representation of what actually happened, which is that in a few years, six million Jews in Europe were systematically killed. So no, leaving a few thousand aliens on a different planet is not like that.

Other than that massive blunder, the religious undertones were tiring and didn't fit at all in my opinion. I didn't get what point Ms Koch was trying to make, and I'm not sure I even want to know.

Sometimes Touched by an Alien is downright contradictory. At one point, a human gay man says something in the lines of "oh, the aliens don't have the gender biases we humans do". Meaning in this case, that it's fine for him to have a relationship with an alien man. Then we find out that all agents in the field are male. Every single one of them. All the females are scientists and are in the base doing god knows what (we never actually see them doing anything useful). How is this not having gender bias? It annoyed me to no end that all the females except Kitty are being relegated to being breeding machines and tech peeps. Nothing wrong with being a scientist - but that's just frigging sexist.

Also, Kitty calls herself a slut a lot during the middle part of the book - because she slept with some dudes throughout her twenty-seven years. And worst part is is that she acknowledges that it's a social construct and that it doesn't make any sense, yet she feels the same way and she still feels guilty for sleeping with another consenting adult.

I think Touched by an Alien is best enjoyed with your braincells turned off or at least hibernating. The story is engaging and there is some erm... alternative fighting going on (for example, dropping salt on a giant slug-alien with a plane) and there are tons of characters all trying to best each other in verbal combat. Enjoyable, but not if you look below the surface. Will probably read the second book in the series, since my biggest problem was with the religious undertones and I expect that the subsequent books probably won't focus on that as much.

[Amanda]

The beginning of the book was a whirlwind of events, and I had a hard time keeping up. It’s not every day you confront an alien and kill it with a pen, then get swept off your feet by a very charming and persist hunk named Martini. I probably got hung up on the fact that Martini is different from the male lead characters in the last couple books/series I’ve read. Martini is funny, open, and he knows what he wants: Kitty. For some reason, I had a hard time figuring out who was who of the people (or, should I say aliens?) that whisked Kitty off after she killed her first alien. I won’t lie, this is probably my own fault. But it took a while to sort it out.

There was so much that happened in this book in such a short amount of time, but it worked, and it never seemed to go too fast or too slow. It was just right, you might say. The amount of snark between the characters had me alternatively snorting and giggling out loud. Hopefully more of the latter than former. Kitty was surprisingly astute and smart – in some ways drawing on the lesson that often we see what we want to, until, or unless, someone with fresh eyes looks at it from a new and different angle. I wonder if perhaps there was some deeper meaning related to religion here, but frankly I was too entertained to really think much of it. Maybe I will later.

Since I read this on my Kindle, it’s still hard for me to judge, but I felt like the chapters were on the shorter side. I know that I have touched on this before – that short chapters usually drive me crazy – but Gini Koch made it work. Every time a chapter came to an end, an invisible force of action and snark propelled me forward. The only other issue I had was that, as much as I liked the ending, the last wrap-up chapter was unnecessary. Maybe necessary if it was the only book, but this is a series, and this book could have ended without the last chapter. I don’t even know why I’m making this an issue, but the ending was almost anti-climatic.

I am interested in what happens in the next books, though. I have a feeling Conspiracy Chuck will have to make an appearance…

See my review in its entirety here: http://onabookbender.com/2011/05/23/review-touched-by-an-alien-by-gini-koch/