I don’t often DNF a book. If I pick something up and make it past the first few pages, I’m usually in it for the long haul. I used to try to finish everything I picked up, but I abandoned that policy a while back. I do a lot of reading for work, so if I’m not enjoying the stuff I read outside of work, I don’t make myself finish it.

Well, it would have been a real slog to finish Barbarian Alien by Ruby Dixon. the tl;dr on this is that it was a lot of the same conversation over and over again in which a human woman clearly states what she wants and an alien man disregards it and is surprised when she doesn’t ‘behave’. 0/10, not even for the spicy bits. This one is not for me. Everything from here has spoilers for both Barbarian Alien and its predecessor Ice Planet Barbarians.

These books are notorious on booktok and in romance circles. They have some pretty massive consent issues and there is sexual assault in them (if no longer on the page, it is certainly implied). In the first book, the heroine Georgie wakes up in a spaceship following an abduction. She and the other women have been taken from their homes and are going god knows where. They are the spares, and they know this because they aren’t in special hibernation tanks. Their spaceship crashes on an inhospitable frozen planet and after rebelling against their captors, they have to find food or help or both. Georgie is up for the task. On the planet, she meets Vektal an alien who is big and strong and immediately in love with her. All the aliens in Vektal’s tribe have a parasite,a khui, that helps them survive on the frozen planet. The khui also tells them who their perfect mate is. Isn’t that sweet? It’s like imprinting from Twilight only instead of it being something magical, it is a parasite! Anyway, the first book was fine because Georgie was pretty awesome, we get introduced to some of the ecosystems and wildlife on the planet and, despite how shitty it was she had been kidnapped and then left on a frozen world with a poisonous atmosphere, Vektal was pretty good about boundaries and she got to make her own choices. All problems aside, it was fluffy alien romance with some spice in it. It certainly isn’t the first time a ‘perfect pairing’ or ‘soulmate’ or something similar has been used as a conceit (see the Twilight reference above. Or, The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf or this nightmare of a book Dark Guardian.)

Barbarian Alien follows a different woman who was kidnapped, Liz. It starts where the first book ends, with the women being rescued by the aliens. They are then taken on a hunt so that they, too, can get parasites and survive on the planet. I might be misremembering this from the end of the first book, because it has been a while since I picked it up, but I thought it had been decided that the women got to choose whether or not they were going to take the parasite or accept a quick death on the ice planet. Well, Liz, who is also pretty awesome, tries to back out of getting a parasite but Raahosh, an alien whose parasite has already let him know she’s his lady, can’t bear the thought of her dying without one, so he forces it on her. Then, because he knows he’s in the wrong! He kidnaps her away to a secret cave so she can’t tell people what he’s done. He reasons that once she’s pregnant, they’ll be sufficiently far enough along in the mating process that no one would dare try to separate them.

So, Liz is a bow hunter, but she’s super precious to Raahosh and she can’t possibly hunt, she might get hurt! So, he keeps her confined in his cave. And she keeps refusing his advances because of course she would. She also says, repeatedly, I don’t care what the parasite says, I get a choice. And I don’t choose this! But Vektal told the alien dudes that they had to respect the human mating rituals and this is all part of the fun human mating ritual, right?

So, our leading lady has been kidnapped by aliens, crash landed on a different alien planet, had a parasite forced on her because *soul mates* or whatever, has been kidnapped again and separated from all the other humans, and for reasons Raahosh speaks English, but he doesn’t tell her that, just listens to her talking to herself and wonders at how chatty she is. I mean, he doesn’t really listen or engage with what she says and when she finds out he speaks English his statements can be pretty much boiled down to, “We’re mated, why are you fighting the inevitable?”

Because she said no. She doesn’t want this. This book is not for me. But! silver lining! That means the third book is also not for me, so I can unhaul it! This annoys me, however, because my mom bought me these books because I asked for them. They’re in perfect condition. Ugh. That makes me sad.

So, those two books are headed to the unhaul pile. And I need a palette cleanser.