He’s spent years as a hunter, but now he’s the one ensnared in a creature’s trap.
Ketahn did not want a mate. Fate has a different plan for him. When the queen he despises declares her intention to claim him, he retreats into the jungle.
What he finds there changes his world.
Small, delicate, and pale skinned, Ivy Foster is nothing like the females Ketahn has known. She’s not of his kind at all. Yet the moment he sees her, he knows the truth in his soul—she is his heartsthread.
And now that he has her, he won’t let anything take her away. Not the jungle, not the gods, not the queen.
Whether Ivy agrees or not, their webs are entangled. No one will ever sever those threads.
Review:
This ended up being *so* much better than I thought it would be for the first 5 chapters–I honestly came very close to giving up on it before Ivy finally made an appearance, but am glad I ultimately stuck with it. But that beginning–not going to lie, it was rough. I’m not a science fiction reader on the whole, and those first 5ish chapters gave me the same feelings that reading totally new-to-me science fiction does. I didn’t know if we were on earth or not (we’re not), if I was supposed to know what the creatures and places Ketahn described were (I wasn’t), and it was very frustrating to feel so lost for so long.
Once Ivy’s on the page–and not going to lie, even just hearing the ship she came on talk out loud more or less in English made me feel 200x better than I had about the book up to that point–things became *much* easier to read. I really enjoyed watching her and Ketahn learn to communicate, and all the survival lessons that we got to glimpse were fun too. Their developing relationship felt fairly believable, for all that they are *clearly* very different species. (He HAS NO LIPS. And there was a bit more discussion of slits and stems than I’m strictly comfortable with.) I appreciated that the authors let their relationship develop–there is smut, but they take their time getting to know each other first and it feels like a fairly natural progression of their relationship.
I mean, as much as it can when she’s a human and he’s a seven foot tall spider-adjacent humanoid.
This is part of a trilogy, so we’re not yet at an HEA when we get to the final page. I did swap out this book for the next one in the series in my KU library–I’m not going to read it immediately, but I do plan on getting around to it in the not-too-distant future.
Rating: 4 stars / B+
I read this book with Kindle Unlimited.