I love Tiffany Roberts books – I adore the Spider’s Mate Trilogy and the Kraken series. I also enjoy the infinite city books, but I find them more hit and miss. For me, this is in my bottom 3 out of the 7 books in the series so far, which doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just isn’t as good as the others, in my opinion.
In this book, we follow Thargen as he is captured by slavers who end up crashing on a planet inhabited by aliens that like eating people. This book is thus largely a survival scenario romance, with Thargen falling in love with a human woman who was enslaved with him. The tone of this book is thus very different than the other infinite city books, which tend to take place in the infinite city. This also means the found family aspect that makes the series so charming is largely absent from this book. I’m totally down for this overall plot, and it’s really smaller plot elements and things that annoy me that take this book down a notch for me.
The main thing that annoyed me is the trope where both people really like each other, but one has some sort of issue that’s all in their head and the issue is resolved when they simply choose not to care about that any more. I prefer more external barriers to the relationship. If that isn’t a trope that bothers you, you will probably enjoy this book more than me.
My second issue that annoyed me is tied to the first. Part of what is holding Thargen back is an incident in the past where he accidentally hurts someone during a sexual encounter. This is a very serious issue, and he feels very guilty about it, as he should. I don’t know what he should have done to make up for it, but I felt the argument the FMC gave him really was insufficient. ‘Oh, you SA’d someone by accident? that’s very regrettable, but don’t worry, that won’t happen between us because we like each other.’ I understand why this background was necessary to support his mental hurdle to having a relationship, but it felt like it was too big of a strike against him to be kind of brushed aside and made me not like Thargen as much as I wanted to.
My next issue is entirely audio based. This book introduces Kier and Kayle, some of my favorite characters in the series, and I was really looking forward to meeting them. The voices for them do not disappoint – the issue appears not when the characters are speaking but rather during narration. The narrator has an accent that doesn’t have hard Rs, so whenever he says Kier’s name while not as a character, the name sounds like “Kia” and drove me bonkers. I read the ebooks, so I know his name is Kier, but if you only listened to the audio, you would be confused about his name.
All this to say, this book is fine, it just has a plot trope that always annoys me, and I feel Thargen’s past was handled a bit to heavy handed, I wish that was done a bit differently, but it wasn’t enough to make me rage quit or anything. The next book in the series is Kier and Kayle’s book, so I’m very much looking forward to listening to that next.