R. Lee Smith

This book comes with all the trigger warnings. It is very well written, but I feel like I was tricked going into it because I ignored the reviews DO NOT BE ME. I thought I was going to be reading some cheesy futuristic romance, what I got was a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel with a romantic subplot that is really a metaphor for redemption. If you are not in the right headspace, don't read it. I certainly was not, but I stupidly kept reading anyway. There are also some triggers for our current hellscape about pandemics and capitalism, but also a lot of violent death and rape and problematic subtext that I will not go into here. I just thought that this book's trigger warnings need trigger warnings.… (meer)

This is easily one of the best things I've read all year. I won't lie, I was put off by the cover and the whole interspecies romance thing. But it is so much more than that! It's well written, has a great pace, funny, and Meoraq is so fleshed out that you won't see him as a lizard alien, you'll see him as a person.

I will warn readers, there is a ton of graphic rape in this book. Like, a lot. Add weird lizard anatomy into the mix and...yeah.

This book was a very pleasant surprise. Don't be put off by the length, it did not feel like 1000 pages at all because I couldn't put it down.… (meer)

Reserving from rating because the parts with Kane and Raven were too, too dark. I did like Tagen and Daria together and the story was intriguing, but Kane was just an irredeemably bad person. Not just "he's an alien so maybe our morals don't match" but straight-up evil. And because this is very explicit, the "sex" scenes were too much (let's call it as it is, these were rape scenes).

My biggest issue is that, while Kane is def presented as a bad dude, the tone of the text seemed to be more along the lines of "he's a bad boy" as opposed to "he's a murdering rapist" even when his actions were murdering/raping.… (meer)