Beth F's Reviews > Lover Eternal

Crack. Crack laced with rat poison. That’s what this series represents.

I’ve now read the first two books in this series and feel that both have been pleasantly distracting, entertaining and I intend to finish the series post haste. However, I’m definitely camping out with everyone who’s ever read these and gone, “huh?!? How could I possibly be enjoying this?”

The Black Dagger Brotherhood is a group of warrior vampires who are fighting to protect weaker civilian vampires from evil, soulless, albino vampire slayers who smell like baby powder. If that’s not compelling enough to get someone to pick this series up, I don’t know what is. (HA!!!!) Each book focuses on the romance of one brother and the female of his destiny.

In this particular book, the brother in question is Rhage. Rhage is an oversexed vampire with a dragon curse (oooh, dragons outside of a medieval mystery or epic fantasy!) Whenever he loses his temper, he turns into a dragon and kills everything in sight. Sex helps him control the dragon. Sex and fighting. Duly noted and kind of hot, so I was intrigued.

Rhage’s lady friend is a human woman named Mary who volunteers for a suicide hotline and also happens to be dying of leukemia. Obviously she’s being set up for some kind of immortality deal. Sort of boring when you’re dealing with a vampire story, in my opinion, however, I should note that in Ward’s world, vampire bites do not turn humans into vampires. Vampires are born, not made. So I was also intrigued how Mary’s inevitable death due to cancer could be worked into immortality if the restrictions of the world prevent her from becoming a vampire herself.

***spoilers past this point***

In addition to containing spoilers, this is the part of the review where I will complain about the things I did not like about this book and then try to pinpoint the exact reason this series has me panting for more (that shipment from booksfree.com can’t get to my mailbox fast enough)!

For starters, let’s start with the overarching complaints that have impacted the first two books in the series and will likely extend to the rest (based on the series research I’ve conducted thus far):

--The heroes names are insane. And not in the good way. Wrath? Rhage? Phury? Zsadist? And in this particular installment, an adolescent vampire who dreams of the name Tehrror is introduced to the mix as well. Give me a flipping break!

--“Shitkickers” annoy the bejeebus out of me. Apparently to be a fully-fledged member of the brotherhood, one cannot wear boots, one must wear “shitkickers.”

--The tough guy dialect shared by the brothers makes me cringe and I feel embarrassed for them whenever they talk to each other. Actually, come to think of it, the affected vernacular (it has to be affected because literally NO ONE ELSE in their world talks that way except the brothers) reminds me of people I’ve met in real life who are emotionally weak and/or were picked on *horribly* as children and have adopted a tough image to overcompensate. Maybe that’s not too unheard of given the fact that pre-warrior vampires are born as weak, pencil-necked geeks. But even if that’s the case, the way they talk to each other annoys me.

--The rap music. Um, no. Just no. The references were over-the-top and ridiculous. And they made me laugh, which I don’t think was the point.

The reason I did not particularly like this book was because I felt it fell apart in the middle. It started strong. It was intriguing. And then something happened that turned me off so badly that I realized I’d reached the point of no return with this couple and regardless of how they worked the problem out amongst themselves, I was done with them.

Despite the fact that sex supposedly calmed Rhage’s dragon beast, being with Mary had the opposite effect. As he kisses her and tries to be intimate with her, he can feel the beast coming closer and closer to the surface and is reluctant to have sex with her for that reason. She doesn’t know about his curse so he’s scared of frightening her or hurting her and tries to prevent this from happening by backing away from her when it becomes too much to handle. At one point, he decides to go to a bar to meet a strange woman and have anonymous sex with her, which will then allow him to “be” with Mary without losing control. Mary doesn’t know his reasons, but she knows he leaves her in his room to go out and have sex with a stranger.

I think most romance readers would be annoyed by his decision to do something like this. However, knowing there was a fairly legitimate reason for doing this bought him a small bit of leeway from me. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t completely out of character. However, immediately after he returns from the bar where he admittedly has just had sex with some strange woman, she jumps his bones and they have sex for the first time.

WTF???

That pissed me off BIG time. OK ladies, if your man leaves you alone in his bedroom and you know he’s just gone out to have meaningless sex with an anonymous stranger, the first thing you do NOT do is share your holy of holies with him the second he returns, mmkay?

After that happened, I didn’t really care less about what happened to either of them. I had a hard time taking either of them seriously after that point and the fact that the last portion of the book spent more energy in setting up the next installment in the series rather than in resolving the plots within its own pages also irked me to no end. The book just sort of ended. It wasn’t even on a cliffhanger.

Mary’s civilian vampire friend, Bella, was abducted by the evil slayers. Bella is being slated to be the destined female for Zsadist in the third installment of the series and it peeves me to no end that she was abducted in the second book and not even mentioned in the last chapter. The last chapter of Lover Eternal was a happy, sappy ending between Rhage and Mary and had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that her friend had been abducted a few chapters earlier and never rescued. Lame.