Continuing Janie and Quinn's story through their engagement and marriage and dealing with a number of the outstanding issues from the previous book while also setting the stage for further novels in the series.

There's a lot of acknowledging of the criticisms I had of the previous book going on in this one.

"Quinn is too controlling": he owns that specifically here, but provides the most common and least creepy justification for this, in that he feels that they own each other. Well, the book is about Neaderthals I guess; it says so right in the title.

"Janie is too judgemental": was a criticism I was making about her use of "slamp" in relation to Quinn's previous affairs. Well not only does Janie explicitly own that she tends to see the world in black and white and most people fall short of her standards, she ends up having a very positive relationship with one of Quinn's former "slamps".

"Janie is often the wrong side of annoying/entertaining": there's a lot more nuance in the writing here and it's also more clearly shown that Janie's random regurgitations of semi-relevant trivia are a defense mechanism.

I think there's a lot of inherent baggage that goes along with the billionaire romance trope that the first book bought into (while subverting it in some ways) that really can't be overcome, but this book does have a good go at. It will be interesting to see where this series ultimately ends up. This was an improvement on the previous book, and probably 3.5 stars rounded up because we're not allowed to be more nuanced than that on this site.