A rant-y four star review:

The romance plot: All the stars. Completely deranged. Obsessive, possessive, barbarian bad guy catching feelings for the first time amazingness.

But,

—Rant Intermission—

Let me have a teensy rant. Because the premise was wack.

This was all fine: humans cryo-froze themselves and woke up 4,000 years in the future where post-climate-crisis-civilization-collapse tribes were living in the Nouveau Bronze Age.

What made no sense: our language expert heroine’s whole schtick was using her polyglot skills to understand future languages—but also, future humans had all genetically evolved into basically aliens. A bunch of different types of aliens.

No. Because for a language, 4,000 years is too long. We don’t know what languages were around 4,000 years ago and we have to hypothesize the existence of the Proto-Indo-European language like we hypothesize the existence of dark matter.

But for human evolution, 4,000 years is nothing. Not even long enough to develop a new eye colour, let alone new everything. And with those population bottlenecks?? These future peeps should have looked and acted human.

—Rant Intermission Over—

I really really tried to ignore the premise’s wack-ness (hence all the pent-up ranting?). But I do wish this book had been the first book in a spin-off, instead of just one standalone-y book in this series. All of these potential new spin-off-y stories ended up as side plots here and it made the story drag a bit.

Still, a good read when you’re craving a bonkers barbarian warlord guy who has A LOT to grovel for.