For me, a book is a three star reading experience when I liked just as many parts of it as I disliked. It’s neither a good nor a bad rating to me. It’s a both rating.

[this is the third book in the spin-off of the spin-off of Ice Planet Barbarians. There’s weird alien peen and snow, that’s all you need to know]

So, for this book I liked:
✨ the silly and camp-tacular tone Queen Ruby brings to all of her blue alien books
✨ experiencing a new human-alien culture clash in this world
✨ just seeing all my beloved side characters again
✨ I love a virgin alien MMC dumb-dumb plus some fated mates horniness
✨ I was rooting for these two! I thought they were really compatible

But I disliked:
▪️ the one-sided language barrier didn’t fully scratch my itch for this trope
▪️ the romance plot was more restrained than I’d hoped it would be
▪️ I didn’t get the Tia redemption arc I wanted. She’s been kind of the villain of Not-Hoth in many ways. And I didn’t come around to her side as much as I’d expected to
▪️ we did some scene repeats from book one (because both stories start with the same event)—but not in the way I like. Instead of fully recreating the scenes, they got all floaty and summarize-y. But the scenes were too central to this story not to fully recreate them here, imo.
▪️ there was a too-obvious solution to the romance plot drama for it to take them the whole story to figure it out (although I’ll grant that they were both kinda idiots so that maybe made sense)

There you go! This is exactly how I talk to myself when a book is getting three stars.