Overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Plot/Storyline: 📖📖📖📖
Feels: 🦋🦋
Emotional Depth: 💔💔
Sexual Tension: ⚡⚡⚡
Romance: 💞💞
Sensuality: 💋💋💋💋
Sex Scene Length: 🍑🍑🍑🍑 
Steam Scale (Number of Sex Scenes): 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Humor: Not much
Perspective: First person from both the hero and heroine, though it’s mostly in the heroine’s head

Basic plot:
Seven years ago, the Rift occurred – the skies ripped open, dragons took over and now the world suffers in fire and ash. Claudia is one of the human survivors left. She gets caught scavenging and to pay for her illegal activity she’s left for dragon bait.

Give this a try if you want:
- Post apocalyptic world in 2023 after “the rift”
- Dragon shifter hero, human heroine
- Huge hero (described as at least a foot taller), small heroine
- Higher steam – 5 full scenes along with a shorter one/some alluded to
- A hero that’s all about claiming and providing for his mate


Ages:
- Heroine is 25, hero is an old dragon lol

My thoughts:
I was so looking forward to this book! I just adored the first book of Dixon’s Ice Planet Barbarians and was sure that dragon shifters would be even better. But, sadly, this book just didn’t work for me.

I think it had promise – and I don’t think it’s a bad book, it just didn’t work for me personally. Perhaps if it had been shorter I would have tolerated it better. But as it was I found it really repetitive and lacking in depth.

The sex was hot and that’s why it gets 3 stars. BUT I still was annoyed with parts of this because the first time Kael and Claudia have sex, he fully ‘claims’ her with a bite and she just can’t get over it. It takes over the entire story line between them, her fretting over the bite and it just go annoying to me.

I felt like I didn’t know the characters that well by the end of it. Most of the perspective is in Claudias head, so you get to know her a bit more. But she feels bad for herself a lot of the time, or blames herself for all the world problems and I didn’t understand why she felt like that. Things like


I’m bitterly furious. If I’d been here, this wouldn’t have happened. I could have kept Sasha fed with my scavenging. Amy, too. All of this was my fault.

and


The fact that she’s been put in this position because of me makes me feel helpless and awful.


But WERE you really providing for them? Or was everyone miserable? Everyone was miserable, no one had food, your friend was still selling her body...it was just absurd to me how she wallowed in all of this. I just wanted her to be more of a go getter I guess? Like Georgie from IPB…

Kael I just couldn’t love either. He had no substance. He was very MINE. CLAIM. MATE. Which, yeah, I can totally eat that up. But there was nothing else there. Every time you were in his head it’s all he said repeatedly and I just felt like I was reading the same dialogue over and over again. 

Perhaps it was my mood, I’m not sure. I had higher expectations for this one. But I would definitely try the next in the series and see if it picks up for me!

Content Warnings:

- Possible consent issues – the heroine is kind of captive/without choices though sex is consensual. She’s worried she’ll be raped and he does bite her without her permission
- Death on page
- Animal hunting, death, cooking, and eating
- Plenty of guns/shooting/gunshot injury
- Mention of physical and sexual abuse of side character
- I kind of got some fatfobic vibes here – the evil mayor is constantly described as fat, things like ‘his fat face shakes with rage’, “a short, fat man with neatly combed gray hair”, “I’ve seen the fat man walking around Fort Dallas before”, “instead of the fat mayor”, “the fat hypocrite” etc – I haven’t gotten these vibes from her other work at all but in this one I just thought it was excessive when there were plenty of other words that could be used to describe him

Locations of kisses/intimate scenes:

42% - 🔥 kisses, oral for her, missionary sex on the bathroom floor
63% - 🔥 kisses, blow job
70% - 🔥 oral for heroine
74% - oral for her (short)
83% - 🔥 doggy style sex
94% - 🔥 heroine plays with herself, oral for her, missionary