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Book Reviews: Risdaverse #3-4, by Ruby Dixon

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I received a collection of the short stories (#.75-2) and the first two full-length books in the Risdaverse series by Ruby Dixon (When She Purrs and When She Belongs) in a monthly Renegade Romance Box. Thank goodness they are special editions, because I full-on HATE the covers on the normal version. I would NEVER have picked them up.  I think they are cheap-looking and tacky, and they don’t AT ALL fit the tone and content of the actual stories. These are a vast improvement.

Though, as a funny side note, When She Purrs has a side character named Jamef in it who is a Mesakkah (therefore large and blue with horns and dark hair), who has prosthetic limbs and a red eye. Imagine my surprise when I get to reading When She Belongs and find that the character on the cover is not in fact Jamef but a new character named Jerrok. Cue three chapters of confusion until I went back and double checked the names. LOL

risdaverse covers

I reviewed the short stories here, where I said “collectively, I thought they were merely OK. One I disliked; the rest I found entertaining but fairly bland, trope-heavy, and overly reliant on telling the reader about things that happened off-page in undocumented passages of time.” I reviewed them individually on Goodreads. This post is for the full-length books (#3 & #4), When She Purrs and When She Belongs. 

When She Purrs:

Life on a farm planet at the edge of the universe can be dangerous for a human woman alone.

That’s why I need a husband. ANY husband.

Unfortunately, all the men I approach keep running off. So I hire a bounty hunter to kidnap me someone capable and strong, someone who will scare off the creeps that are trying to move in on my territory.

It’ll be a marriage of convenience only.

I should have been a little more specific about who I wanted, though…because the intimidating and fierce praxiian male that the bounty hunter brings to me? The one with feline features, big arms and an even bigger…uh, farm?

He’s the problem I was hoping a new husband would scare off. What am I supposed to do now?

(Don’t ask him, because all of his suggestions are completely and utterly filthy and have nothing to do with a marriage of convenience.)

Review:

100% I think this full-length book is significantly better than the preceding short stories. Plot-wise, they are all very formulaic. They’re basically the same story arc in different colors. But the full-length book gives the story the time to develop that the short stories lacked and desperately needed. That said, I still thought this was only OK. The premise requires that the FMC do something so ridiculously stupid that I could not believe that someone with any sense of their circumstances (which she definitely has) would do. Also, all of it could have been resolved before the book even began with a simple conversation…or even so little as introducing themselves to one another. Plenty of books have this problem, but it was especially stark here. The characters are very sweet, though, and I do like an MMC who is 100% all in. Plus, the bounty-hunter comic relief was funny. As I said, it was an OK read, and sometimes that’s enough. Not everything has to be high literature.

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When She Belongs:

He’s the biggest jerk in the galaxy.

I can live with being stuck on the far end of space. I can live with having to spend weeks on an abandoned station in an asteroid belt. Sure, I don’t belong, but I’ve got my book and my eight-legged attack cat with me. I should be fine.

I’m not fine.

My alien host, Jerrok, is a jerk. He’s surly and unpleasant. He hasn’t bathed in years. He’s part cyborg – and all those parts seem to be falling to pieces. He’s the one in charge of this remote station, which means we’re forced to interact. It’s an absolutely miserable situation for both of us…

…until I realize that all his anger and bluster is covering the fact that he’s thoughtful and understanding. He’s protective, too, keeping me safe when the bad guys approach. When I get hurt, he’s the one tenderly caring for my wounds.

Jerrok is also intensely, utterly lonely, just like me.

As time passes, I start to wonder…maybe where I belong isn’t a place…but a person.

Review:

As I said above, the longer books are better than the short stories. However, I think this one was too long. It felt like it took me 2 years to finish, and I found it repetitive…redundant even. Dixon tells the reader the same thing over and over and over again. Having said that, the characters are very sweet. I like that she is as fiercely protective of him as he is of her, and he doesn’t (much) try to discourage that. And I love that he falls hard and is 100% in. But, as with the previous books (they are all very formulaic), much of the plot’s tension could have been resolved with a simple conversation. There are also a whole host of other characters who feel very much like they are from other series/books (probably are), but I don’t know which ones. So, to me, they just felt random, whereas for others, they may be a sentimental check-in with a known couple. All in all, this was an OK read. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it.

As a side note, I noticed some formatting issues in this book (not in the previous one)—things like words being split with a hyphen for no reason. I am assuming that’s because in other versions that would have been a line-wrap, and it wasn’t corrected for in the special edition. Just mentioning it.

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Book Review: Wicked Creation, by A. Vrana

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I picked up a copy of A. Vrana’s Wicked Creation as an Amazon freebie, probably during a Stuff Your Kindle event. (Side note: Does anyone know if A. Vrana and A.J. Vrana are the same person?)

wicked creation cover

Doctor Leilani Kāne is no stranger to death. Earth became uninhabitable many decades ago and now the human race is living on Mars, fighting to keep from going extinct. In a last-ditch effort to find a new planet to call home, she is assigned to a station on one they call Cerebrius 207. However, this new planet is deadlier than any she’s ever seen before. In the four years she’s been there she’s lost hundreds of lives, but her superiors won’t listen to reason and give up on a planet that seems insistent on killing them. With dwindling resources and a sickness plaguing the humans from an indigenous plant, she has no choice but to continue to save the lives she can.

That is, until one fateful night …

When she goes to investigate a mysterious sound coming from the clinic, there’s nothing there except some footprints that don’t look human. Next thing she knows, she’s somewhere she doesn’t recognize and thrown into a confusing world of aliens she never knew existed. Faced with the idea of being true mates to not just one, but four of them, she has to decide whether to go back to her human life, or stay and learn to live among strangers with new rules she doesn’t ever plan to obey.

my review

Look, I didn’t hate it. I appreciate a 35-year-old, non-virgin who likes sex, military educated, doctor, theoretically POC, curvy heroine (though neither are very well established and not at all incorporated). I liked the way the men/beasts were very caring, perfectly willing to say lovely, loving things. Plus, the subversion of the “mine” trope, where the men say they belong to her, not that she belongs to them, made me happy. But I definitely had issues with it.

Some of those issues are of the ‘this is problematic’ sort, such as the fact that there are basically no other women in the book. There is a single human friend who appears briefly (thus, I expect she’ll be the heroine in the next book); otherwise, the heroine is the only female in the entire 400+ page book. Or the whole noble-savage-y, Native American-like representation of the aliens. Hmmm, kinda icky.

Mostly they are of the annoying deus ex machina variety, where the heroine gains almost limitless power and then defeats aliens —bigger, more knowledgeable, better trained, and more powerfully socially positioned than herself—with ease. Suuuure, I believe that. Or the way she only encounters five males, each of whom falls for her instantly (one is dispatched). But then that whole plotline is dropped, and the reader never knows whether she magically meets her mates first or whether the humans really do entrap every male they encounter. It’s sloppy wicked creation photoplotting. In fact, I think a lot of it is sloppy plotting. Very author-insert-y.

And yes, I do realize that the sex really is the point here. World-building is just the frame that the sex is hung on, and the plot is mere garnish. But that didn’t make it any less annoying, especially since the book is so unnecessarily long —far longer than what feels like the genre standard. All in all, I call this a middle-of-the-road read. I didn’t hate it, but I was kinda meh about it.

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Book Review: The Prisoner’s Gambit, by Kira Quinn

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A couple of years back, I won a book giveaway that included the first three books in Kira Quinn‘s Mark of the Infala Series. Last Year, I read book one, The Alien’s Bond, as the Q book in my yearly Author-Alphabet Challenge. (You can see my review here.) I’m doing the same with book two, The Prisoner’s Gambit, this year.

The Prisoner's gambit cover

Being taken prisoner by ravenous green-skinned aliens was not cool, but when the Raxxian ship fell under attack, breaking apart and crashing on a planet in a galaxy far from home, Maureen realized that was only the beginning.

There was one bright side though. She had made a friend. A thickly muscled, blue-skinned hunk of a friend at that.

Stranded and alone, the pair’s attraction was obvious from the start, but much as they wanted to see where things might go between them, a new ordeal was spoon thrust upon them. One that threatened to separate them just as things were getting interesting.

It would be a struggle, but with their attraction growing by the minute it was a fight worth having. It would be hard, but if they managed to succeed, perhaps life as a survivor on an alien world wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all. Judging by the chemistry between the human woman and rugged alien male, it looked like it could be quite enjoyable indeed.

my review

OK, look. I did not expect to like this book. I gave the first book in the series a 2-star rating last year and did not expect this one to be any better. But I challenged myself to clear some physical books off of my shelves this year, and needed a Q for my yearly Author-Alphabet-Challenge. What I also did not expect, however, was for this one to be worse than the first. I didn’t like the character in the first book and was just sort of bored with the whole thing. This one is just plain bad.

I think the author does not know what she wants to write. There is not enough sex for me to call it erotica and therefore accept that the sex is the point, not a plot or character development. (And what sex there is is abrupt, uninteresting, and 100% not sexy. Forplay, what’s that?) But the prisoners gambit photothere also isn’t enough of a plot, and absolutely no character development. So I can’t call it a romance or a character-driven story.

Add to that, many events rely on world-building that is so unidimensional it makes little sense. The villain was only slightly removed from being the clichéd woman scorned trope (*yawn*), and I was quite simply bored the whole time. But hey, I can mark Q off my challenge list. So it’s not a total waste!

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