Overall: 3.5 rounded to ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Plot/Storyline: 📖📖📖📖
Feels: 🦋🦋
Emotional Depth: 💔💔💔💔
Tension: ⚡⚡⚡⚡
Romance: 💞💞💞
Sensuality: 💋💋💋
Intimate Scene Length: 🍑🍑🍑
Steam Scale (Number of Scenes): 🔥🔥🔥 - if you’re generous. They are all together in a very short spot of the story.
Humor: Yes, a bit
Perspective: Third person from both the hero and heroine

Should I read in order?
This is the first book in Roberts’ The Spider’s Mate trilogy. Books 1 and 2 end on cliffhangers, so read in order.

Basic plot:
Ketahn is avoiding clan politics and his distasteful queen by living in The Tangle, a wild area of the planet, when he discovers a crashed ship and wakes Ivy.

Give this a try if you want:
- Science fiction romance
- Alien setting – heroine lands on an alien planet where the book takes place
- Primitive setting – hunting/gathering and not much technology (they live in the Tangle, which is a jungle environment)
- Human heroine/alien hero (details below)
- Language barrier
- Huge hero/tiny heroine
- Hero nurses heroine back to health
- You’re okay with some abduction/dubious consent themes at the beginning
- You’re okay with a cliffhanger ending (they are together and happy – the series is a trilogy before full HEA
- Light to medium steam - there's 3 scenes but they are one right after the other in a small percentage of the book

Ages:
- Heroine is 25, no idea about hero’s age or lifespan.

My thoughts:
So I liked a lot of parts of this one but also was really bored for some of it. This book just felt so long to me. The beginning has a lot of set up for the clan issues and Ketahn’s life on the planet. He doesn’t have page time with Ivy for quite awhile and that always gets to me when the mains aren’t together soon in the book. I started this one about 7 months prior to finishing it. I kept putting it down and picking it up again only to read a chapter or so and setting it down again. It wasn’t one that kept me super engaged.

But when Ivy and Ketahn were together I really liked it. I love language barrier and I enjoyed them circling around each other in the beginning and learning to communicate. I liked the slower build of their relationship. I enjoyed the world building and that they were together alone in the jungle. All those were big romance favorites for me.

I think this book was just too long for me? I don’t plan on continuing the series. It’s not that I don’t think I’d like it necessarily, I’m just not that invested in these two and the stress of the clan politics and the evil queen was pushing me away. I will take the happy for now I got between the two of them and enjoy it haha.

 Cock/Hero Stats:

- Hero is similar to a spider from Earth.
- Eight violet eyes
- 6 ½ to 7 feet tall
- Humanoid torso with a chest and narrow waist with the backside like the abdomen of a spider.
- Two sets of arms, one over the other, and 6 legs. Hands have 3 fingers and a thumb with black claws. (More limbs, smaller ones, tucked against the lower abdomen between it’s two front legs)
- Doesn’t have lips
- Fangs and mandibles
- Black and white hair and black skin with markings on it that glowed white and purple
- Purple tongue
- Hands are twice the size of the heroine’s
- He calls his cock a ‘stem’ and it rests behind a slip
- Males have lubricant that slicks the way for sex, not females
- Vrix have a heartsthread that links their two hears and spirit together
- They put webbing inside injuries to help bind the cuts and heal faster
- His cock is long and thick and has two bulges on either side of the base. The shaft widens and then tapers at the tip where there is a two inch slit.
- When he orgasms, it was accompanied by a firm, fluttery sensation at the head of his cock. Something swept insistently against her cervix, stroking her inner walls. That fluttering quickly grew in speed and urgency as the pulsing of his shaft intensified, turning into a vibration. (hide spoiler)]

Content warnings:

- Scenes of death/murder
- Colonization – humans leave earth to form a new colony on Xolea
- Toxic family members (some brief memories)
- Heroine remembers surviving a tornado
- Heroine is attacked by a ‘velocitiger’
(Random note for myself – the journey to the planet was supposed to take 60 years, but Ivy finds out it’s 168 years since launch)

Locations of kisses/intimate scenes:

 
32% - Ketahn licks Ivy’s tears off her face
39% - touches and groping while Ketahn explores Ivy’s body
67% - some light touches
83% - 🔥 Ketahn binds Ivy’s wrists and attaches it to the ceiling, then ties her up. Oral for her, sex
88% - 🔥 her on top
91% - 🔥 kisses, him holding her sex