books_ergo_sum's Reviews (933)

ThE sExUaL tEnSiOn. In this book.

Oh my, it was intense. This book was just 216 pages of heart-squeezing, throat-drying, blush-inducing sexual tension. That was it. It was amazing.

Virgin hero. Road-trip. Some adventure danger. And just So. Much. Pining.

Book four was so sweet! I loved our golden retriever alien hero. He was so silly, so jovial, so earnest. Also, he was the tallest alien in the tribe and—the dong was proportionate 😂

There was some alien planet adventure times, some female friendship goodness, and a cute romance.

The pacing made me nervous—everything was hunky dory pretty early and I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. But the third act action wasn’t stupid, so I needn’t have worried.

This heroine wasn’t my fav, though. I like grumpy FMCs but Kat was lashing out a bit too much for me.

Another fun one! Just when I think I’m getting desensitized to weird alien monsters and nothing will surprise me, we got this hero 😆

If anyone comes for my sweet baby angel: nine foot tall, Godzilla-look-alike, Kor… they’ll have to get though me first.

Not me getting all teary-eyed over a bonkers, read-in-one-day alien romance. This had my favourite amount of action danger and sweet emotions, aka maximum of both. 

Loved the adventures. Loved watching our heroine fall for someone who externally monstrous but so internally sweet. The overall series plot arc was also heating up, and I’m here for it!

My first meh of the series.

Nothing really wrong with it, I just wish it had taken all the little story elements further. We had an older, grumpy, starchy, widower alien guy and an optimistic, southern, sweetheart vet tech human lady. 

I was ready for the age gap, the widower feelings, the grumpy-sunshine. But the book was holding itself back a bit, I think. 

The breeding kink dirty talk was 🔥 though. Good for them!

THIS WAS SO GOOD! It’s my most anticipated book of the year and it delivered everything I wanted and more. I love that the bonkers-silly tone of Ice Home (spin-off number one) is what we’re getting again with this new spin-off. There was so much joy, so much new-series-possibilities—I’m excited 🥰

Also our human lady, a librarian and fanfic writer, knew all the weird romance tropes. Her mind was pure filth and her dirty talk was excellent 😂 Her coupled with R’Jaal, arguably the most mate-obsessed alien in the entire Ruby Dixon-verse, was everything.

These two just shot to the top of my favourite Ruby Dixon couples list! And a stepback on a new release alien book?? I am so happy right now!

Here’s my rule: if, after the first few pages, LITERALLY NOTHING HAPPENS for the rest of the book—no cliffhangers allowed.

I wanted danger, angsty age gap, and the mess of a hero lusting over the woman he abducted to become the fiancée of his own son 😅

But I think this one over-promised and under-delivered. Our heroine was so ‘barely 18’ that she’d literally graduated high school yesterday. For what? We dodged all the drama by making her maturity levels inconsistent and nonsensical.

The son’s fiancée plot? Hand-wavingly abandoned at 35% and replaced with... shopping and a lamb named Lamborghini (kill me).

And this brat/brat tamer dynamic hurt my heart. They had chemistry... until the bedroom, where they became different people. Her brattiness disappeared and, though he’d talked a big game about wanting ‘spirit’, he’d turn into a Dom who wanted total obedience. It was so different from their non-sexual relationship, and even their sexual fantasies about each other, that it felt inauthentic and kind of sad.

Later, there were some more authentic (and hot 🥵) scenes... but they fell into my least favourite kinky romance pattern: kink scenes when the relationship wasn’t very developed, replaced with non-kinky scenes only as their intimacy and respect increased. That’s not what I’m here for.

Plus all the Canadian references were incorrect and it just annoyed me.

What do I even say?? 

A new all-time favourite, ofc! Why did it take me so long to read this?

The premise of this book has always sounded amazing to me. Regency best friends, they both go off to war, and when she’s presumed dead, Viola took her chance to live as herself. And somehow out of all that we’d get some ‘A Lady for a Duke’ HEA goodness.
✨ Friends to lovers with so much built-in angst? Check.
✨ “I thought you were dead” secret identity drama-lama? Check.
✨ Gender during Regency times? Check.

Even if the author had wielded this premise like a sword (instead of like a pen, which of course is mightier), it would have been a great book. BUT THE WRITING! So soft, so careful, and major Jane Austen vibes. If you love the feeling that this quote from Persuasion by JA invokes:

“There could have never been two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.”

.. then you have to read A Lady For a Duke 🥰

These characters were so consistent, so thoroughgoingly themselves, that I was spellbound by everything they thought, said, and did. Reading this book, I spent just as much time staring into space thinking about a scene or line of dialogue as I did actually reading the words on the page.

What an excellent book!

A lot about this book was great. Love a hero with a secret identity. Love a romance that feels a bit forbidden—here, because he was her father’s lawyer and she was supposed to marry a more upperclass family friend. The courtroom drama plot brought all that Gilded Age New York I love from Shupe. And I’ve experienced a total 180 with this audiobook narrator (Justine Eyre) who I used to avoid but now enjoy, especially for historicals set in North America.

That said, the story overall was falling short of five star vibes because our heroine was too.. good? I wasn’t feeling super invested because she didn’t have a ton of flaws or character arc potential. Also, her good qualities were a bit contradictory? She was the level-headed responsible one who hesitated to disobey her parents. But she was also a gambling Robin Hood who fought against inequality and spoke her mind. She was one of the guys, besties with all the girls, humble, but also the most popular and beautiful debutant of the season? idk.. am I a jerk or does that all sound less fun than a character with a flaw or two? 🤷🏻‍♀️

But then the ending became too meh, which dropped it down to a three star. Even though I only had 16min left in the audiobook, I put this book down for days and even considered DNFing it.. because I just didn’t care 🙈 Nothing super wrong happened, there were just too many weak story elements for me. We had random side characters show up to do some info-dumping then Exit Stage Left. The guy she was supposed to marry ended up being a less interesting foil for the hero than I’d hoped. And the forbidden-ness of the romance plot was walked back instead of resolved, imo.

Still, I’m interested to see what this series will bring with a different cast of characters.

This is a tough one for me to rate. Because that romance plot was not it. At all. Yet overall, I wasn’t having a bad time, because the non-romance parts of the book were interesting? (Who am I?)

Even though I’m almost never looking for a mystery plot, I was still entertained by this whodunnit. It was just convoluted enough to keep me guessing 😆 Our MCs were also pretty fun. I especially liked our heroine: she was self-reliant and street smart but still traditionally feminine—in a way that was just cool. 

But the romance plot was a No for me, dawg. It felt rushed because it occurred over just a few days and was overshadowed by the mystery stuff.

But mostly, the Other Woman drama? Strongly disliked. He was in love with someone else (and talked about her a lot 😬)… yet, these two MCs were getting emotionally and physically intimate while he was still in love with that person (literally post-💦 inside of our heroine, he was talking about how much he loves this other woman and how perfect she is?? I could not).

From his perspective, it felt cheater-y. And from her perspective, I was just like “Girl, you’re better than this!” If there had been some growth (even a grovel), I could have been into it. But our hero felt really boy-ish (even F-boy-ish?) the whole time. Nothing was really addressed. And there seemed to be a ‘married people cheat but still love each other’ theme going on with some of the other side character couples? The whole thing put me on edge—it didn’t feel like a reformed rake story… just a rake story 😅

Yup, this was fun.

Our alien hero was kind of a crazy nut, which I appreciated. Our human heroine was into it. We had some primal kink, some literal bodice ripping, and generalized unhinged horniness—so good for her! 😂

The plot was also really fun. Our meet-cute/meet-disaster occurred during a multi-day trial to the death out in the wilderness. Lots of sharing body heat and getting attacked by monsters, my favourite.