Thursday, April 9, 2009

Lover Eternal - J.R. Ward

This book is another one to fill the requirements of the Love Bites challenge (which I've more than completed now. I just have to get the reviews up).

Lover Eternal

J.R. Ward
Signet Eclipse
Copyright: 2006
0451218043

From the cover of the book:

In the shadows of the night in Caldwell, New York, there’s a deadly war raging between vampires and their slayers. And there exists a secret band of brothers like no other - six vampire warriors, defenders of their race. Possessed by a deadly beast, Rhage is the most dangerous of the Black Dagger Brotherhood...

Within the brotherhood, Rhage is the vampire with the strongest appetites. He’s the best fighter, the quickest to act on his impulses, and the most voracious lover—for inside him burns a ferocious curse cast by the Scribe Virgin. Possessed by this dark side, Rhage fears the times when his inner dragon is unleashed, making him a danger to everyone around him.

Mary Luce, a survivor of many hardships, is unwittingly thrown into the vampire world and reliant on Rhage’s protection. With a life-threatening curse of her own, Mary is not looking for love. Her faith in miracles was lost years ago. But when Rhage’s intense animal attraction turns into something more emotional, he knows that he must make Mary his alone. And while their enemies close in, Mary fights desperately to gain life eternal with the one she loves…


The sequel to Dark Lover, this was another book that I couldn't put down. The characters are gripping and the story moves fast. And the twist at the end... It's a romance novel, but for a while I was wondering as I couldn't see any way for the traditional happy ending.

One thing I'm really enjoying about this series is the way that characters other than the main focus character of the book get their time on the pages as well. The only books I have to compare it to are the Sherrilyn Kenyon Dark Hunter series and the books by Kinley MacGregor, where the characters from the previous books are simply background mentions. Here they are developed and grow preparatory to their own books and the books don't wind up into neat little packages. There's always some loose end to continue into the next book

The villains are downright creepy, although the worst are in the next couple of books (I'm about three ahead of where I'm reviewing now).

There are a couple of things about this series that I don't particularly care for however. The first one I've mentioned before: the way the author has gone about creating the language for the vampires: simply adding an "h" to a word and having it mean the same thing, and doing the same with names. They just seem a bit 'cute'. Still, it doesn't really get in the way of the story. The second is the amount of miscommunication between the main characters. By the third book, there is definitely a pattern and it gets to be a bit much. On the other hand, without it there might not be as much plot there. Overall though, I'm really loving this series, and this book nearly brought me to tears with one or two of the plot twists, such as Rhage's interactions with the Scribe Virgin.

If you like the paranormal romances, give this book a try. It's well worth the money at over four hundred pages and a small to normal font size instead of a large font and larger margins/line spacing.

The books in the series:
Dark Lover
Lover Eternal
Lover Awakened
Lover Revealed
Lover Unbound
Lover Enshrined
Lover Avenged

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