REVIEW: Barbarian Lover (book) by Ruby Dixon

Barbarian Lover is sci-fi erotic romance. It's the third book in Dixon's Ice Planet Barbarians series. I bought my copy new.

This review includes spoilers. 

Review:

Of all the women stranded on this planet, Kira is most likely to hold herself apart from everyone. While many of the other women hope they'll find a mate among the sa-khui (and therefore a firm place in their new community), Kira knows she won't, for reasons she's afraid to reveal to her alien hosts. When she was a child, she contracted an illness that left her infertile.

Initially, the translation device that the other aliens surgically implanted on her ear gave her some useful skills. Now, however, she's aware that she needs to find some other way to be useful in case her infertility is discovered. Unfortunately, the translation device is proving to be more and more of a burden. It not only gives her painfully sensitive hearing (she is embarrassingly aware of who is having sex with whom), it also seems to be a way for the original aliens that were going to sell her and the other women as sex slaves to track her.

To protect everyone, Kira gets permission to travel to the remnants of the sa-khui spaceship to see if there's anything there that can remove her translation device. Easy-going and cheerful Aehako is one of the aliens who agrees to go with her and protect her - largely because Aehako is interested in sad-eyed Kira, even if their khui haven't resonated.

I really liked what I'd seen of Aehako in previous books, so I was looking forward to this one. Unfortunately, I was never firmly on board with this series in the first place, and this particular entry included something I'm not a fan of, infertility magically getting fixed. In her author's note, Dixon attempts to explain how her way of handling things was better than the usual "magical dick" solution, not recognizing that fixing the character's infertility in ways no real human woman could ever hope for was the bigger issue. Which just underscored that the problem is the premise on which the whole series is based. It was unfortunate, because Aehako and Kira did actually reach a point in their relationship where Aehako was insistent that it wouldn't matter to him if his khui resonated with someone else, because Kira was the one he'd chosen. The author could have found a different ending but chose not to.

I mean, heck, this book already had an example of a character who refused to care about who her khui said she should be with. A past lover of Aehako's who was now unhappily mated to another sa-khui kept trying to reignite their relationship. Oddly, the social implications of this were never covered - it was like the rest of the community either didn't know or didn't care what she was doing, even though they all pretty much lived in each other's pockets. We didn't even get a hint of how her mate felt about her repeatedly pursuing someone else, just Aehako's annoyance and disapproval.

All in all, this was fairly disappointing.

Extras:

A bonus epilogue and yet another "Ice Planet Honeymoon" extra, this time starring Aehako and Kira of course. The extras start a little over two thirds of the way through my copy of this book, which took me aback somewhat.