Barbarian’s Tease

This is a wonderful book. The characters have such depth and it is wonderful to watch the MMC regain his sunshiny outlook and attitude. I really enjoyed watching their friendship grow and the neat games that they played with each other. The serious aspects were very intense as well as very thought provoking. This story definitely hit my heart.

3 stars — I was NOT a fan of Brooke. I was bummed that we finally got Taushen’s story, and he ended up with Brooke. Which is not to say that she’s horrible, but she had a lot of horrible human moments in this book, and it wasn’t the love story I wanted for Taushen. In the end I enjoyed their connection, their friendship, their chemistry…but I wish he didn’t have to go through her games to get to that point. Brooke exhibited so many traits I generally dislike from my own gender. She was manipulative, she played human dating games with Taushen, she just basically lacked empathy and communication skills. It should have been obvious that these big blue dudes have ZERO clue about human courtship rituals. And maybe not at first, but it’s like she never learned…she kept going as though he would understand her coy hair flips and whatnot. I mean seriously…I hate games in regular human relationships/romances, but this was just cruel. It really is hard to like someone who is so oblivious to how she is affecting others, how they are feeling, and really thinking of things only from her own perspective. Basically, I was mega disappointed in this one. It wasn’t without great moments, don’t get me wrong. But it wasn’t enough IMO. Taushen was sweet, eager, lonely but determined. He’d been through a lot. And he got toyed with. Barbarian’s Tease is the perfect title for this book. So what did I like? When they went on “vacation” and we got a montage of them becoming friends and really connecting. The actual literal games they played (like eye spy). The steamy moments were pretty solid. And the end with all the new peeps that leads to a new spin off series, it has me very excited to move on to that. In fact, I’m kind of torn whether I should just finish this one, or what the reading order is supposed to be. I think the remaining books in this series go back in time??? I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.