The perfect blend of sweet, sexy romance and a riveting, high-stakes survival story.
A woman stolen by aliens crash-lands on an ice planet and finds love.
Dixon’s wildly popular series—it’s a fan favorite on TikTok and has a podcast dedicated to deconstructing each episode—is finally coming to print. In this first installment of the series, Georgie and at least a dozen other 22-year-old women are stolen from their homes on Earth by green aliens. Something goes wrong, and the aliens abandon their human cargo on an icy planet the women dub Not-Hoth. After engineering an escape plan, Georgie becomes their de facto leader. She bundles up and trudges out to find help and meets Vektal, a 7-foot blue alien and the leader of his tribe, the Sakh. His people have developed a symbiotic relationship with an organism called the khui, which allows the Sakh to survive the brutally cold temperatures of their home planet. Vektal’s people mate for life, but since there are very few women left, he has resigned himself to life without a partner. When he sees Georgie and his khui resonates, a physical response akin to purring, he knows she is destined to be his mate. Explorations of coercion, consent, and free will are woven throughout the story. Vektal’s unorthodox greeting shows that consent might operate differently in his world; but in the end, he learns that humans trapped in the worst of circumstances will still fight to control their own destinies. The book is fast-paced and sexy, but the major appeal might be Vektal. He is a romance main character stripped down to the core: desperate to find his partner and willing to do anything to keep her happy.
The perfect blend of sweet, sexy romance and a riveting, high-stakes survival story.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-54602-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
An intriguing romantasy melds inventive worldbuilding with a classic fairy-tale plot.
A woman sent to kill a magical beast in the forest instead meets a mythical king.
A year ago, Riela saved her village from a flood with magic she didn’t know she possessed. Now there are reports that a beast has attacked a hunter in the magical Forsaken Forest, and her neighbors insist she must fight the monster, even though she has little control over her magic. Riela realizes she’s likely to be killed, but she's saved by a powerful mage who transports her to his enchanted castle. Garrick is an Etheri, a member of a race of immortal mages who Riela thought were only a story; he's the king of the Silver Court, but a longstanding feud with Feylan, the king of the Blood Court, has trapped him on this plane of existence for 100 years, unable to reach his people in the Etheri realm of Lohka. Garrick tells Riela she's going to have to stay with him since the forest traps any magical being who enters. Riela and Garrick’s uneasy alliance is fueled by guarded suspicion and strong attraction. Garrick suspects Riela's a spy because of her powerful magic, and can’t understand why she doesn’t recognize him. Riela is afraid of Garrick's power and doesn't know if he's telling the truth about the forest. As they're trapped together, Garrick comes to realize how rare and dangerous Riela's magic is, and decides to help her learn to use it. This is Mihalik’s first romantasy after a string of well-regarded SF romances; it has rich, lush worldbuilding, especially once Garrick and Riela start to explore the secrets of her magic. Watching these guarded, wary characters learn to trust each other makes for an entertaining and compelling romance. The book is the first in a series and ends with a cliffhanger, with Garrick and Riela on the precipice of a new adventure.
An intriguing romantasy melds inventive worldbuilding with a classic fairy-tale plot.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9780063411586
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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