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
Sloppy worldbuilding undermines a high-concept romance.
A teenage time traveler is stuck in the past.
Magnolia Brown’s parents invent personal time-travel suits in the 2070s. When Magnolia is 16, the three travel back to 2024, hoping to warn people about the coming ravages of climate change. Her parents don’t realize their suit design is stolen while they’re there, and the resulting flood of time travelers causes massive societal unrest. Magnolia’s parents are arrested and executed for these crimes, but Magnolia is adopted by a pastor and his family, including two sons, in Aubrey, Kansas. Two years later, Magnolia has fallen in love with one brother, Fallon, while the older brother, Ramsey, is on the front lines, fighting the wave of time travelers. As Fallon’s girlfriend, Magnolia is protected from the disdain and hatred of the townspeople who see her as the poster child for the evils of time travel. After a fire at the high school, Magnolia is determined to repair a time-travel suit and go back in time to prevent the tragedy. In the process, she grows closer to Ramsey and discovers that she may have been in love with the wrong brother all along. Unfortunately, Bailey’s first foray into SF romance is not a success, with both the worldbuilding and the plot underdeveloped. The mechanics of time travel are inconsistent, as are its effects in the story. Based on what any scene requires, supplies are either scarce or readily available, technology is either advanced or it backfires, and laws are either ignored or rigidly enforced. Magnolia thinks, acts, and operates like a 2026 teenager even though she grew up 50 years in the future. Bailey brings her characteristic heat to the romance between Magnolia and Ramsey, but he’s barely a character in his own right. Readers are unlikely to understand his devotion toward Magnolia or the dramatic sacrifices he makes on her behalf.
Sloppy worldbuilding undermines a high-concept romance.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063381018
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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