Antonia Bernardin

My 31st book of the year was Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon, first book in the Ice Planet Barbarians series. If you are in the booktok/bootube/bookstagram sphere… you know what this book is about, I am very late to the hype but I needed a short audio book and thought, why not?

If you’ve been under a rock, this is your warning that the book is NSFW, very spicy and the review is most likely not suitable for under 18’s.

A vague summary

The book opens with our main character waking up on an alien ship to discover that she has been kidnapped by aliens and is being transported with a dozen other women to be sold, for who knows what purpose. When the ship experiences technical difficulties, the aliens abandon their cargo on a ‘safe’ planet; a frozen land with seemingly no other intelligent life. That is until Georgie comes across a 7 foot tall alien barbarian, whose only goals seems to be doting on her, feeding her, keeping her warm and making her… feel good. They can’t communicate but eventually she manages to convince him to help her rescue her fellow passengers, when they discover that the planet’s atmosphere is toxic, they are faced with a choice: risk it with their alien captors, or take on an alien parasite that’ll allow them to stay.

My thoughts

Look… if you came at this book expecting high brow literature, you are going to be disappointed. If you approach this book expecting a fun, silly time with lot’s of alien smut, you are going to have a good time. It was a surprisingly engaging story to be honest, there is an actual plot and world building around the smut, but that is what it is at its core. I wanted to listen to it because I remember all the hype it got on tiktok and I wanted to see what it was about, it also fitted the bill of a very easy, fun listen.

My only criticism is that there was a rape scene right near the beginning, while the women are still being held captive by the ones who took them. I suppose it was done to juxtapose how the barbarian aliens treat the women later… but since I was after a silly, goofy listen, this scene just wasn’t what I expected to find in a book like this and was quite jarring. I wanted to make sure I mentioned it in my review because I literally never see it mentioned in other reviews.