What do you think?
Rate this book
Never Love A Stranger
One ordinary evening, Annie finds a gorgeous, naked man in her kitchen--a criminal from the distant future who's running for his life. Now Annie and James have to find a way to change the future before fifty million people die...
199 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2004
4 people are currently reading
52 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 13, 2012
Annie has been widowed for a year and is lonely, but even while she thinks longingly of some male company, she doesn’t consider the kind that just turns up in her kitchen… stark naked. Not only that but he says he cannot explain why – or how – he’s there. Like that. There’s no sign of a break in and all the doors are still locked.
“Fine. Don’t bother to explain,” she growled. “I wouldn’t want you to strain yourself coming up with a story. But what exactly do you want from me? Dinner?”
To her shock, he nodded. “Dinner would be appreciated, thank you.”
Now I know he’s crazy, she thought numbly. She waved the knife at him again. “Get the hell out of my house, or I’ll use this thing, damn it.”
“I do not intend to hurt you,” he repeated, “but I cannot leave. As you can see, I have no clothes.”
I love this premise. Right up there at the beginning, no messing about. I’ve read a few of Ellen Fisher’s novellas and she knows how to lay out a story for maximum impact in a short wordcount.
Annie decides to play along and suggests that she leaves the house to go and buy him some clothes, meaning of course, to go straight to the police.
He cocked his head quizzically, obviously suspicious of her sudden capitulation. “I could not repay you. I have no money.”
Naturally, she thought wryly. The most gorgeous man I’ve ever met is not only a psychopath, he’s a broke psychopath.
And then he confirms his strangeness. He asks again for some food as she leaves, but doesn’t seem to (a) understand how to open the refrigerator door or (b) recognise the contents. He must have amnesia, she decides, but no.
“My name is James.” He stuck a finger into the spaghetti sauce and tasted it, then looked down at her. “I’m from the future.”
His gentle, almost child-like nature and his visible confusion about Annie’s home make her feel less threatened and she allows James to stay the night. In the morning, after refusing point blank to see any kind of doctor, she lends him some of her late-husbands too-small old clothes and they set off for the mall to buy him something in his size. They talk. He tells her a little of his life far in the future – where he claims to be employed as a nanny – and she’s still convinced he’s crazy. That is, until a strange woman shoots a weird space-age gun at her. They barely escape.
“Why do they want you?” she whispered. “Are you some sort of escaped criminal?”
“Yes. That is precisely what I am.”
And then he hits her with it.
“What do you mean, you tried to free your people? Were your people at war with them?”
He shook his head slowly, meeting her gaze. “Not precisely.”
“Then what do you mean? Were you some kind of… of servant?”
“No,” he said softly. “I was a slave.”
And according to James, he is the only survivor, which is why he’s being hunted.
The scene is set. Annie finds herself more than curious about James and as you might expect, things progress in the, uh, physical department. She’s lonely, he’s gorgeous and they seem to get on really well together, but he draws back when she tries to touch him. Too late, she realises that he wasn’t just a nanny.
He swallowed audibly. “It is not my job to take pleasure,” he said roughly. “I am supposed to give you pleasure.”
Yup. That sort of slave.
Their love scenes were tender and intimate as James discovered that he could enjoy being with a woman and as you might expect, they start to fall in love. However, the bad guys are still on their tail and catch up with Annie when she’s alone.
“He’s a good man,” she said firmly. “You won’t convince me otherwise.”
“You poor deluded idiot. He’s not a man at all.”
Up to this point, I loved the story. Loved the characters, the drama, the uncertainty of their situation, but then it took a brief nose dive. Annie, her friend Kay and James have a series of long – over-long – discussions about humanity. What it takes to ‘be’ a ‘person’, and if James can be a person or not. At this point I wanted to take Annie by the neck and shake some sense into her. She’d already fallen in love with him, so I can guess that she felt betrayed by this missing piece of information, but even so.
Thankfully, after debating this over and over again, the story picked up and set a blistering pace through the pages. Plenty of angst.
Pain flared in his eyes. Then slowly, something cold and hard began to glitter in the brilliant blue depths. He stared at her with icy distaste.
“I thought you were different. But you’re not. You’re just like the rest of them.”
The last third of the book twists and turns with shocks aplenty and it became difficult to put it down. I desperately wanted Annie to be able to love James and for them to make a future of their own together, even as it looked more impossible by the minute.
This was a full length novel and shows that Ellen Fisher can certainly command attention for that duration. I’m rating it a happy 4 out of 5 because of the slump in the middle. And I’m being mean, it wasn’t a real slump, more of a slight dip than anything. I’m certainly looking forward to my next Ellen Fisher.
“Fine. Don’t bother to explain,” she growled. “I wouldn’t want you to strain yourself coming up with a story. But what exactly do you want from me? Dinner?”
To her shock, he nodded. “Dinner would be appreciated, thank you.”
Now I know he’s crazy, she thought numbly. She waved the knife at him again. “Get the hell out of my house, or I’ll use this thing, damn it.”
“I do not intend to hurt you,” he repeated, “but I cannot leave. As you can see, I have no clothes.”
I love this premise. Right up there at the beginning, no messing about. I’ve read a few of Ellen Fisher’s novellas and she knows how to lay out a story for maximum impact in a short wordcount.
Annie decides to play along and suggests that she leaves the house to go and buy him some clothes, meaning of course, to go straight to the police.
He cocked his head quizzically, obviously suspicious of her sudden capitulation. “I could not repay you. I have no money.”
Naturally, she thought wryly. The most gorgeous man I’ve ever met is not only a psychopath, he’s a broke psychopath.
And then he confirms his strangeness. He asks again for some food as she leaves, but doesn’t seem to (a) understand how to open the refrigerator door or (b) recognise the contents. He must have amnesia, she decides, but no.
“My name is James.” He stuck a finger into the spaghetti sauce and tasted it, then looked down at her. “I’m from the future.”
His gentle, almost child-like nature and his visible confusion about Annie’s home make her feel less threatened and she allows James to stay the night. In the morning, after refusing point blank to see any kind of doctor, she lends him some of her late-husbands too-small old clothes and they set off for the mall to buy him something in his size. They talk. He tells her a little of his life far in the future – where he claims to be employed as a nanny – and she’s still convinced he’s crazy. That is, until a strange woman shoots a weird space-age gun at her. They barely escape.
“Why do they want you?” she whispered. “Are you some sort of escaped criminal?”
“Yes. That is precisely what I am.”
And then he hits her with it.
“What do you mean, you tried to free your people? Were your people at war with them?”
He shook his head slowly, meeting her gaze. “Not precisely.”
“Then what do you mean? Were you some kind of… of servant?”
“No,” he said softly. “I was a slave.”
And according to James, he is the only survivor, which is why he’s being hunted.
The scene is set. Annie finds herself more than curious about James and as you might expect, things progress in the, uh, physical department. She’s lonely, he’s gorgeous and they seem to get on really well together, but he draws back when she tries to touch him. Too late, she realises that he wasn’t just a nanny.
He swallowed audibly. “It is not my job to take pleasure,” he said roughly. “I am supposed to give you pleasure.”
Yup. That sort of slave.
Their love scenes were tender and intimate as James discovered that he could enjoy being with a woman and as you might expect, they start to fall in love. However, the bad guys are still on their tail and catch up with Annie when she’s alone.
“He’s a good man,” she said firmly. “You won’t convince me otherwise.”
“You poor deluded idiot. He’s not a man at all.”
Up to this point, I loved the story. Loved the characters, the drama, the uncertainty of their situation, but then it took a brief nose dive. Annie, her friend Kay and James have a series of long – over-long – discussions about humanity. What it takes to ‘be’ a ‘person’, and if James can be a person or not. At this point I wanted to take Annie by the neck and shake some sense into her. She’d already fallen in love with him, so I can guess that she felt betrayed by this missing piece of information, but even so.
Thankfully, after debating this over and over again, the story picked up and set a blistering pace through the pages. Plenty of angst.
Pain flared in his eyes. Then slowly, something cold and hard began to glitter in the brilliant blue depths. He stared at her with icy distaste.
“I thought you were different. But you’re not. You’re just like the rest of them.”
The last third of the book twists and turns with shocks aplenty and it became difficult to put it down. I desperately wanted Annie to be able to love James and for them to make a future of their own together, even as it looked more impossible by the minute.
This was a full length novel and shows that Ellen Fisher can certainly command attention for that duration. I’m rating it a happy 4 out of 5 because of the slump in the middle. And I’m being mean, it wasn’t a real slump, more of a slight dip than anything. I’m certainly looking forward to my next Ellen Fisher.
April 23, 2011
Interesting Concept Collapses Under Weight of Execution Problems
Since Annie Simpson's husband died a year ago, she's been living a lonely, boring life. At first it helped her heal, but now her days seem empty and lacking purpose. One night, however, Annie enters her kitchen and is stunned and scared to see a large, gorgeous, naked man standing there. Before she can flee or call the police, James convinces her he's not going to hurt her. When Annie finds out he has come back to the past to flee the group intent on killing him, Annie thinks he's insane...at first. Then she starts to believe. Horrified by the grim picture of the future that James has painted, one of slavery and butchery, she offers to help. She's drawn to James in a way she's never felt before, not even with her husband, and when James is near her, she can't help but feel alive. When the full scope of the truth comes out, however, the question of life becomes a hotly contested topic, and Annie's previous blind faith may result in the death of everything she holds dear.
Never Love a Stranger is a difficult book for me to review. I didn't like it, but I can appreciate what the author accomplished and what she was trying to accomplish. I think the concept of the book was good. It was an interesting plot and Fisher's vision for the future was pretty comprehensive and impressive. There were a lot of layers and deceptions, ill intents and heroic actions that blended together in an odd, yet compelling way. I can understand how some readers would find some of the revelations in this book to be disturbing, even though I'm not one of them. Yes, there were things in this book that were difficult to accept and not something you'd find in a traditional romance novel, but I found those aspects to add a sense of gritty realism to the motivations of the characters.
That realism was appreciated, especially as I found it so lacking in other aspects. I had significant issues with character action and dialogue from the very first page. I felt neither were very believable through the whole of the book, and I can't imagine anyone with a modicum of self preservation acting as Annie did when she first saw James. The dialogue between the characters was often heavy-handed, trite, or cliched, and very little of it felt organic to the characters or the situations they found themselves in. The characters themselves, especially James, were inconsistent throughout and James' personality and vernacular fluctuated between believable for his backstory and situation to bordering on absurd. Any time a character who has supposedly traveled back in time from over three hundred years into our future, and has been shown to be perplexed by the identity and function of something as pedestrian as a bath towel may lose a lot of cred as future-guy when he starts uttering such modern colloquialisms as "Go to hell."
I appreciated the author's intent, but this book is also beleaguered by a large schism that splits the book into two parts and turns a slightly common but basically harmless time traveler romance into a quagmire of scifi frustration and implausibility. I acknowledge that my preferences in reading lie elsewhere, so I don't want to appear hypercritical of issues that wouldn't please me if they'd been penned by Asimov himself, but I can't help but feel that the material and plot were larger than Fisher's ability to translate the ideas to the page. I hope that doesn't sound like harsh criticism, because I love that Fisher tried. I just don't think that there are many authors who can do it effectively and believably to begin with - time travel is literally littered with paradox and confusion, and defining an entire futuristic landscape in the span of half a book is a mighty task.
Had Fisher's ambition for this story stopped at overcoming the...er...intrinsic differences...between Annie and James, I think I would have been okay with it, but all told, it was too big a concept and handled with too little sophistication to be enjoyable for me.
~*~*~*~
Reviewed for One Good Book Deserves Another.
Since Annie Simpson's husband died a year ago, she's been living a lonely, boring life. At first it helped her heal, but now her days seem empty and lacking purpose. One night, however, Annie enters her kitchen and is stunned and scared to see a large, gorgeous, naked man standing there. Before she can flee or call the police, James convinces her he's not going to hurt her. When Annie finds out he has come back to the past to flee the group intent on killing him, Annie thinks he's insane...at first. Then she starts to believe. Horrified by the grim picture of the future that James has painted, one of slavery and butchery, she offers to help. She's drawn to James in a way she's never felt before, not even with her husband, and when James is near her, she can't help but feel alive. When the full scope of the truth comes out, however, the question of life becomes a hotly contested topic, and Annie's previous blind faith may result in the death of everything she holds dear.
Never Love a Stranger is a difficult book for me to review. I didn't like it, but I can appreciate what the author accomplished and what she was trying to accomplish. I think the concept of the book was good. It was an interesting plot and Fisher's vision for the future was pretty comprehensive and impressive. There were a lot of layers and deceptions, ill intents and heroic actions that blended together in an odd, yet compelling way. I can understand how some readers would find some of the revelations in this book to be disturbing, even though I'm not one of them. Yes, there were things in this book that were difficult to accept and not something you'd find in a traditional romance novel, but I found those aspects to add a sense of gritty realism to the motivations of the characters.
That realism was appreciated, especially as I found it so lacking in other aspects. I had significant issues with character action and dialogue from the very first page. I felt neither were very believable through the whole of the book, and I can't imagine anyone with a modicum of self preservation acting as Annie did when she first saw James. The dialogue between the characters was often heavy-handed, trite, or cliched, and very little of it felt organic to the characters or the situations they found themselves in. The characters themselves, especially James, were inconsistent throughout and James' personality and vernacular fluctuated between believable for his backstory and situation to bordering on absurd. Any time a character who has supposedly traveled back in time from over three hundred years into our future, and has been shown to be perplexed by the identity and function of something as pedestrian as a bath towel may lose a lot of cred as future-guy when he starts uttering such modern colloquialisms as "Go to hell."
I appreciated the author's intent, but this book is also beleaguered by a large schism that splits the book into two parts and turns a slightly common but basically harmless time traveler romance into a quagmire of scifi frustration and implausibility. I acknowledge that my preferences in reading lie elsewhere, so I don't want to appear hypercritical of issues that wouldn't please me if they'd been penned by Asimov himself, but I can't help but feel that the material and plot were larger than Fisher's ability to translate the ideas to the page. I hope that doesn't sound like harsh criticism, because I love that Fisher tried. I just don't think that there are many authors who can do it effectively and believably to begin with - time travel is literally littered with paradox and confusion, and defining an entire futuristic landscape in the span of half a book is a mighty task.
Had Fisher's ambition for this story stopped at overcoming the...er...intrinsic differences...between Annie and James, I think I would have been okay with it, but all told, it was too big a concept and handled with too little sophistication to be enjoyable for me.
~*~*~*~
Reviewed for One Good Book Deserves Another.
May 3, 2010
Ellen Fisher did a very good job with the whole time-travel plot. I'm not going to give a summary of it because I think this story is best experienced "cold." The story wasn't perfect, there are a few choppy areas and the purpose of a couple of scenes isn't quite clear, but overall this story gives a fresh spin on the time-traveling tale. I think the first half of the book is the stronger part (Fisher does a good job with making the reader believe the "newness" of the time period for the traveler), but there is some good world building in the second half and some interesting story twists. And as usual, I love Fisher's hero. She writes very good heroes!
I recommend Never Love a Stranger as a fun way to spend the afternoon.
I recommend Never Love a Stranger as a fun way to spend the afternoon.
November 9, 2019
I almost skipped the book because of the cover. I thought it would be a regular romance novel, but then I read description and just had to read it. Time travel and artificial intelligence in a romance novel? Something I never saw before.
Of course it is still a romance novel and has plenty of sex scenes, but the plot doesn't concentrate on it. I thought the story was really fun with a lot of great twists. I liked that I didn't know what will happen. If it was a sci fi book I would probably rate it a bit harsher because there were some areas that were a bit unclear, but for the most part it was really good. And when it comes to a romance novel I think this was so far the best plot that I have ever read.
Of course it is still a romance novel and has plenty of sex scenes, but the plot doesn't concentrate on it. I thought the story was really fun with a lot of great twists. I liked that I didn't know what will happen. If it was a sci fi book I would probably rate it a bit harsher because there were some areas that were a bit unclear, but for the most part it was really good. And when it comes to a romance novel I think this was so far the best plot that I have ever read.
March 3, 2015
I really wanted to like this, it actually pained me to finish this, it really did. It's not as fantastically written as some of the reviews lead me to believe. I get its a novella, short and sweet, right? Well, it's short but this one is not sweet. It was choppy and rushed but with poor taste, lacking in detail in some areas and too much in others. I could probably keep going but I think the point is made. Maybe it's just me but it left me saying to myself "seriously?" a few too many times. I really can't see how this has so many decent reviews.
September 22, 2013
I, Robot with steamy graphic sex.
This was a different take on androids. It was okay, but slow in places and it didn't capture my interest as much as many other sci-fi romance book have and do. The interesting part was how it all fit together, the mystery of it. I didn't get a strong sense of the couple really being in love. Didn't really care for them.
It's worth a read just because of the mystery aspect and how it all fits together.
This was a different take on androids. It was okay, but slow in places and it didn't capture my interest as much as many other sci-fi romance book have and do. The interesting part was how it all fit together, the mystery of it. I didn't get a strong sense of the couple really being in love. Didn't really care for them.
It's worth a read just because of the mystery aspect and how it all fits together.
June 18, 2010
In fairness, I skipped most of the sex scenes, but the book works as a romance/science fiction story. It is a good story without the sex, and others may prefer reading graphic sex scenes as well.
It is hard to discuss the book without giving away some of the twists, but the twists were fun, even the predictable ones.
It is hard to discuss the book without giving away some of the twists, but the twists were fun, even the predictable ones.
May 13, 2011
“Maybe she was, this early in the pre-Colombian coffee era of the morning, but she couldn’t seem to grasp what the hair dryer had to do with him standing naked in the hall.”
An entertaining and steamy sci-fi romance. :)
An entertaining and steamy sci-fi romance. :)
December 20, 2010
Perfectly adequate... Could have been better, if not for the long drawn out, unnecessary info.
April 28, 2011
I Robot with flesh
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews