Book Review: Lover Avenged by J.R. Ward

J.R. Ward, I wish I knew how to quit you.

I love the Black Dagger Brotherhood books, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. The heroes have become alpha male caricatures. The stories jump back and forth so much it is almost impossible to keep things straight. And the product placement. Oh my god, it has become insane.

In Lover Avenged, we see Rehvenge’s love story play out. As you may remember from the earlier books–and don’t even think of jumping into the series with this book; you have to have read the others, or you will be hopelessly confused–Rehvenge is the town drug lord and owner of ZeroSum, the bar where the Brothers hang out. Rehvenge is using massive amounts of dopamine to supress his symphath side. In a routine doctor’s visit, he is tended by Ehlena, the only nurse who can stand to be around him. Ehlena feels strangely drawn to the enigmatic man, but she prefers to pursue a safer choice in men and rebuffs his advances. For a while.

Their love story follows the typical course: Rehv pursues Ehlena. She agrees to see him once, and somehow on their first date, she and Rehv wind up in bed and he releases his bonding sperm. They angst over their star-crossed romance, but eventually get their happily ever after, which coincidentally soothes all of Rehv’s lifelong emotional baggage. (I’m not giving away any spoilers, here. We know the HEA is coming.) There is a bit of a role reversal, with Rehv being the partner in peril, but other than that, it is pretty standard BDB fare. I was afraid to read Rehv’s story because I did not like him at all in the previous books, but Ward did a good job of making me care about him and his woman.

We get too-brief glimpses of our other brothers. Wrath and Beth work through some relationship issues. Tohr gets back on the Brotherhood horse. Vishous, Butch, Phury, Zsadist, and Rhage get perfunctory roles, mainly so we don’t forget they exist. John Matthew pursues his bizarre attraction to Rehv’s androgynous henchwoman Xhex, but Blay and Quinn are almost completely absent. These younger Brothers have become my favorite characters in the last few books, which have focused on unappealing brothers and lackluster women.

We get cold, emotionless sex scenes that have no romance whatsoever. The sex scenes are written well, with the level of detail you expect from J.R. Ward, but they are so unsatisfying because the characters are either having sex for revenge, blackmail, or malice or because the characters involved are keeping themselves closed off, so the sex is not an extension of the characters’ complete openness with one another.

All of this should add up to a book that I hate, but I enjoyed it. I read it fast because I needed to see how it all played out. I recommend Lover Avenged to the BDB diehards. If you haven’t experienced the immersive and sometimes bizarre world of J.R. Ward’s vampires, visit her website to get a feel for it before committing to the series.

I still enjoy Black Dagger Brotherhood books. They haven’t become an unpleasant chore, as some other vampire series have. Perhaps the final blush of the happy ending outweighs the annoyances throughout the book. I don’t know. I can’t explain it.

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