CBR17 Bingo: TBR – Ruby Dixon is one of my favorite authors, and despite preordering it, I have been holding onto Bull Moon Rising for a rainy day for some time. (Then I read it in one morning, and immediately devoured the sequel By the Horns that afternoon!)
Aspeth is the heiress to one of the oldest holdfasts in the land, but since her father’s gambled away all the family’s magical artifacts, they’re safe only as long as no one realizes how vulnerable they are. The only way to get her hands on more artifacts is to join the Royal Artifactual Guild, but as a woman, the only way for her to join is to marry Hawk, one of the members of the Guild.
Ruby Dixon is one of my favorite authors, and I’ve read pretty much all of her books (and luckily for me, she’s written lots of books!). Though she’s best known for the sci-fi romance Ice Planet Barbarians books, I love her fantasy romance books too, so I was very excited for the announcement of this series.
And as I expected, I loved it. The world of the Royal Artifactual Guild is a fascinating one, . I loved the slowly developing relationship between Aspeth and Hawk, whose grumpy, down-to-earth nature is the perfect counterpart to idealistic Aspeth. The found family that Aspeth gains with her Five is also quite sweet. Dixon explores themes of misogyny in this book (which is a common theme in her books), but she also surprisingly looks at attitudes towards archeology and the difference between preserving and exploiting the past, which I found very interesting.
I did think the romance was a little bit more to the wayside than I was expecting, partly because there’s a lot of world-building in this book and partly because Aspeth’s external problems are so complicated. Which is a shame, because I really did enjoy it!