The perfect blend of sweet, sexy romance and a riveting, high-stakes survival story.
A woman stolen by aliens crash-lands on an ice planet and finds love.
Dixon’s wildly popular series—it’s a fan favorite on TikTok and has a podcast dedicated to deconstructing each episode—is finally coming to print. In this first installment of the series, Georgie and at least a dozen other 22-year-old women are stolen from their homes on Earth by green aliens. Something goes wrong, and the aliens abandon their human cargo on an icy planet the women dub Not-Hoth. After engineering an escape plan, Georgie becomes their de facto leader. She bundles up and trudges out to find help and meets Vektal, a 7-foot blue alien and the leader of his tribe, the Sakh. His people have developed a symbiotic relationship with an organism called the khui, which allows the Sakh to survive the brutally cold temperatures of their home planet. Vektal’s people mate for life, but since there are very few women left, he has resigned himself to life without a partner. When he sees Georgie and his khui resonates, a physical response akin to purring, he knows she is destined to be his mate. Explorations of coercion, consent, and free will are woven throughout the story. Vektal’s unorthodox greeting shows that consent might operate differently in his world; but in the end, he learns that humans trapped in the worst of circumstances will still fight to control their own destinies. The book is fast-paced and sexy, but the major appeal might be Vektal. He is a romance main character stripped down to the core: desperate to find his partner and willing to do anything to keep her happy.
The perfect blend of sweet, sexy romance and a riveting, high-stakes survival story.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-54602-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
A quirky, steamy fantasy that’s just what the romance genre needs.
A trader is swept up into an epic adventure after she inadvertently saves a demon’s life.
Cinnamon Hotpepper has only ever known a quiet, unassuming life on her family’s spice farm, and she doesn’t expect that to change. When it comes time for their village’s deity—the goddess Myva—to choose her new patrons, Cinnamon’s plan is to keep her head down and avoid getting involved with anything too far outside her comfort zone. Staggering home after one too many mugs of wine that same night, though, she inadvertently crosses paths with a demon, someone who should terrify her, and narrowly escapes with her life. The next morning, who should knock on the farm’s front door but the demon himself? Something about Cinnamon has given Fallon Ozul the ability to break out of the spell that has kept him in a monstrous frame of mind. Now he wants her help in seeking out the witch responsible for keeping his kind enslaved and telling everyone they’re evil, putting an end to her once and for all. And who is that witch? None other than Myva, who isn’t actually a goddess. Cinnamon knows she’s not cut out for an adventure like this, but she can’t deny her growing attraction to Fallon, so maybe she won’t try that hard to resist his efforts to persuade her to join him. In the process of destroying Myva’s hold on the demons, they might succeed at changing their world for the better. While the contemporary-feeling dialogue and characterization might clash with the setting and worldbuilding for some readers, and the book’s evolving romance could have benefited from more room to spread out, the story is a charming addition to the fantasy-romance realm.
A quirky, steamy fantasy that’s just what the romance genre needs.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780316570275
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful and snarky with surprising emotional depths.
This debut novel, the first of a projected trilogy, blends science fiction, fantasy, gothic chiller, and classic house-party mystery.
Gideon Nav, a foundling of mysterious antecedents, was not so much adopted as indentured by the Ninth House, a nearly extinct noble necromantic house. Trained to fight, she wants nothing more than to leave the place where everyone despises her and join the Cohort, the imperial military. But after her most recent escape attempt fails, she finally gets the opportunity to depart the planet. The heir and secret ruler of the Ninth House, the ruthless and prodigiously talented bone adept Harrowhark Nonagesimus, chooses Gideon to serve her as cavalier primary, a sworn bodyguard and aide de camp, when the undying Emperor summons Harrow to compete for a position as a Lyctor, an elite, near-immortal adviser. The decaying Canaan House on the planet of the absent Emperor holds dark secrets and deadly puzzles as well as a cheerfully enigmatic priest who provides only scant details about the nature of the competition...and at least one person dedicated to brutally slaughtering the competitors. Unsure of how to mix with the necromancers and cavaliers from the other Houses, Gideon must decide whom among them she can trust—and her doubts include her own necromancer, Harrow, whom she’s loathed since childhood. This intriguing genre stew works surprisingly well. The limited locations and narrow focus mean that the author doesn’t really have to explain how people not directly attached to a necromantic House or the military actually conduct daily life in the Empire; hopefully future installments will open up the author’s creative universe a bit more. The most interesting aspect of the novel turns out to be the prickly but intimate relationship between Gideon and Harrow, bound together by what appears at first to be simple hatred. But the challenges of Canaan House expose other layers, beginning with a peculiar but compelling mutual loyalty and continuing on to other, more complex feelings, ties, and shared fraught experiences.
Suspenseful and snarky with surprising emotional depths.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31319-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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