Tag: Ice Planet Barbarians

Monthly roundup – December 2022

Posted on by Traumadoll

Last monthly roundup of the year. I read fewer books this month than usual due to the untimely demise of my kindle and some trouble focusing in general, but I still got to lots of great books. Mantis was my favorite, followed closely by both issues of The Obituaries and The Astronaut Dream Book. Not a bad one in the bunch though.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️:
Mantis
The Obituaries #2
The Obituaries #3
The Astronaut Dream Book

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️:
The rest

No rating:
One that I won’t name.

So let’s talk about some of these books. I read a lot of weird stuff. Some of it is weird by definition. Anything labeled bizarro is going to be super weird. I knew I was going to love the favorites listed above because I have loved everything I’ve read by those authors so far. But then there are books like the Pet Project series. The first book was recommended to me by Amazon or Goodreads (I don’t remember) because I read a lot of alien porn. This series was not alien porn, but it is solid sci-fi and I really enjoyed it. The series got better as it progressed. There’s a pretty significant time jump between books, but it feels like the natural progression of events.

I also read a lot of zombie books. I know a lot of them are the same story told by different people, but that’s part of why I like them so much. Still, when I read a book that takes a different approach to zombies, I’m all in. Diana Rowland’s White Trash Zombie series is one of those. The series follows a young woman who was turned by a cop who found her dying of an overdose. The zombies in this world are not mindless and go on to live normal lives. Well, as normal as can be expected for someone who needs to consume brains to keep from turning into flesh eating monsters. Not a bad book in this six volume series. I loved it, and even though it took me a year to get around to reading the last volume, I’ll miss Angel Crawford.

Monster romance is a relatively new genre for me. I’ve never really cared for traditional romance or smut and mostly just didn’t read it because the few that I’d tried were disappointing at best and boring at worst. About a year and a half ago, I saw Ice Planet Barbarians on my Goodreads feed. The person who was reading the series usually reads less fluffy stuff, but I’ve loved pretty much everything I’ve read based on her ratings so I gave IPB a go. And promptly fell down that rabbit hole. It turns out I do enjoy romance and smut, I’m just not interested in humans. Go figure. This month’s monster porn, Grunge and I’m in Love with Mothman, were excellent. More mythical creatures, please.

All in all, a great month of reads to wrap up a great year.

Compartment B – Feeling and not feeling

Posted on by Traumadoll
Do you like me?
Well I hope you do
Cause if you like me
Then I think I’m gonna to have to like you too

I’ve never been a particularly romantic person. I don’t watch chick flicks. I don’t read chick lit. Typical non-smutty romance novels can be entertaining, but I’m not getting warm fuzzies from them.

I get my warm fuzzies and emo tears from so many Futurama episodes. From that one episode of My Name is Earl when Earl figures out that Joy and Randy are each others’ first loves. From books about aliens who like to eat pussy and dote on their human lovers. From hair bands. From poems about Mountain Dew commercials. Memes. Pictures of Fry and Leela couples tattoos.

I don’t know if there is a point to this post. I have been in a mood for a while now. Feeling things, not feeling things. Writing, editing, deleting. Crying. I don’t know how to deal with myself other than writing, editing, and deleting. And leaving some of my compartments safely tucked away in my drafts folder so no one else has to deal with me either.

I read a book: Fire in His Blood, by Ruby Dixon

Posted on by Traumadoll

Sometime last summer I saw Ice Planet Barbarians on my Goodreads feed. I had dabbled in the romance/erotica/smutty genre many years ago but the few books I read didn’t really do anything for me so I just thought I wasn’t into it and moved on. Then I saw IPB on an old high school acquaintance’s Goodreads and I decided to give it another shot. I tore through IPB, the spin-off Ice Home, Corsairs, Corsair Brothers, and Risdaverse. That’s a lot of books featuring abducted human woman and sexy blue aliens and I loved them all. When I got through them all, I tried another monster romance by another author but didn’t love it and went back to Ruby Dixon‘s catalog. There is a drakoni in the Ice Home series, so I was familiar with them before I started the Fireblood Dragon series. The drakoni are less appealing to me than the Messakah.

Fire in His Blood describes a post apocalyptic Earth, one where a rift was opened and dragons came through, went mad, and destroyed the world as we know it. As in all post apocalyptic stories, there are human survivors spread across the world in camps that are controlled by whatever militias pop up. In most zombie apocalypse stories, those militias are usually the type who are semi-secretly preparing for the government to declare martial law in the real world. You know the type. This one didn’t specify where the militia came from, or if it did, I missed it. Anyway, this is the story of Claudia, a woman who scavenges to earn enough to keep herself, her sister, and her friend fed and sheltered. There are only two real options for women in this world, scavenging (which is against the law) and whoring. Claudia opts to lead a life of crime, which leads to her capture and incarceration by the militia. And eventual nonconsensual participation in an experiment involving women and dragons.

I’ve read some reviews and noted that many of the complaints are about Claudia and repetition, and those are valid complaints. There is a lot of repetition. And it’s all coming from Claudia and her one track mind. Her entire existence since the dragons set the world on fire has been survival and protecting her sister. So when she’s incarcerated and then forced into this experiment, the one thing she keeps thinking about is how her sister will survive without her. Most of the book is told from Claudia’s perspective and a lot of it is her thinking about how she can get back to her sister and deal with her dragon at the same time. She could have gotten swept up in the romance and left her life behind, but stayed true to herself and figured out a way to come through for her sister, with the help of her dragon of course.

While I still find the drakoni less appealing than my beloved Messakah, I did enjoy this book and will be reading the rest of the series. There isn’t a whole lot of spice, and the spice that is there is timid compared to IPB, but that’s okay. That’s one of the things I like about Dixon’s books. There’s spice, but the story is always good enough that I don’t even mind if the spice level is low. I’m looking forward to more world building, meeting more drakoni, and possibly addressing the problem of the female dragons. All of Ruby Dixon’s books that I’ve read so far feature human women and alien men, so I’m not sure if she will tackle the female dragons, but a girl can dream.