Paula's Reviews > R'jaal's Resonance

I have read every one of Ruby Dixon’s Ice World Series books and her dragon books. She is fantastic at world building and my favorite part is how she writes her male lead characters. Instead of being people that sleep with everyone, most are innocent and wait for their resonance mate. They are also all extremely loving to their human mates who much of the time don’t make sense to them - speaking in English slang, etc.

However, I have started to notice a trend as this series progresses that is going to end with me no longer reading these books.

Ruby has become more about making diverse-looking characters, and not diverse-thinking characters. She forces in character traits or ideas that just don’t make sense with the story or the character. Spoilers ahead…

Rosalind lands on the ice planet in an escape pod. She wakes up without knowing much of anything. She sees something that scares her so she runs off into the icy wilderness practically naked. Now, most people in this situation would be thinking about survival - where am I going? What did I see? How am I going to survive? What does Rosalind think about? Her fanfiction - where she goes into great detail about writing about Kirk and Spock from Star Trek having sex and somehow making babies. Yes - that is what she is thinking about.

Her disturbing fanfiction is all she thinks about - to a nauseating degree. Ruby wants you to know only one thing about this character - she writes fanfiction. There is nothing else you need to know because Ruby says so. There’s is nothing deeper - don’t even try to look.

Now Rosalind is imprisoned with R’jaal who she soon finds out is a friend and trying to keep her safe. He is obviously from a primitive planet - discernible by his clothes and speech. So instead of making conversation that he would relate to and understand, she continues to talk about what? You guessed it - her fanfiction. Something he doesn’t know anything about. Then when she sees his spur she asks, “Can you make a man pregnant with it?” Really? Is R’jaal going to think this makes sense?

And yet R’jaal continues to think her ‘clever’. How do we know Rosiland is clever? Does she make an escape attempt or try to construct a weapon or tool? No - we know she is clever because Ruby has R’jaal say she is clever over and over. She is clever because Ruby is telling you she is clever.

The constant need to insert Rosiland talking about her fanfiction, or her fantasies of ‘Riddick topping Kirk and making him keep quiet’ pulls you from the story instantly. How is this pertinent to the story? It’s not. Rosalind is so sick and on the verge of dying without the khui - but she can’t be troubled with survival - no, she wants to relive her fanfiction porn. At some point you would think her survival instinct would kick in. Unfortunately that really doesn’t happen. She is saved by others with common sense.

I went back to the front of the book to read the ‘trigger warnings’ - which I usually ignore since I don’t want spoilers. The most tame items are warned against, such as ‘food tampering’, but there is no mention that this book features constant themes of men getting pregnant by other men and having babies.

This series are supposed to be an escape - it was not. I think it has come to it’s natural end. The first ones were great - my favorite to read, but now that Ruby is going away from her core audience to fringe ideas I think this will be the last one.