BARBARIAN'S TOUCH

Two new human women are rescued and learn to live on an ice planet.

A cargo hold full of kidnapped human women crashed onto an ice planet. The original group of women fell in love and were mated with the men from the small band of blue aliens who inhabit the planet. Now, in Book 7 of Dixon’s Ice Planet Barbarians series, a group of aliens and women return to the crashed ship to free two women who were trapped in stasis. Rokan is one of the aliens on the rescue crew. His strong sense of intuition, what he calls “knowing,” tells him he is essential to the rescue mission. When sisters Lila and Maddie awaken, they are shocked by their new circumstances. Lila is deaf, and her cochlear implant was removed by the kidnappers. She feels helpless without the ability to hear and relies on Maddie to help her understand the strange new world. One of the aliens on the rescue team takes Lila from the group, hoping if they are alone together she will "resonate" with him, which indicates that two people are fated mates. Rokan's sense of intuition tells him Lila is in trouble, so he separates from the rescue crew to hunt for her. When Rokan finds her, she had already escaped on her own, a satisfying corrective to several earlier books in which human women fall in love with their captors. (Yes, there's a lot of kidnapping in this series!) Rokan agrees to teach her the basic skills, such as hunting and trapping, that will help her survive on the ice planet. Lila is won over by Rokan, who values her as an individual with her own needs and desires. Rokan cares about communicating with her and learns basic signs. Although this installment of the series continues to show the new culture the humans and aliens are creating together, Lila’s deafness is a plot device rather than a well-developed or accurately researched part of her character.

New characters illuminate the growth of a small hybrid alien-human community.