Book Review: Blood Kiss by J .R. Ward

Hi readers, 

So, I'm finally reviewing this! I read it like in July but it's only now I've got around to writing about due to everything else that I've been writing about. I double checked the publishing date and this came out last year, but as normal I had to wait for it to become paperback and then to get around to reading it. I remember being super excited to hear that Ward, who is my second favorite author, was bringing out a new series that connected to the Brotherhood and that she'd gone back to how she had originally written those first few books, which I fell in love with.

I didn't feel disappointment, nothing has changed in her writing style or characters, but I was hoping that the story would focus more on the new characters and what seems to be the next generation of the Brotherhood. Instead though, the plot is divided into two; Paradise and Craeg's love story and Butch and Marissa murder mystery story. Both do work well together and it's typical of Ward's Brotherhood novels to be divided into two or three story plots that feel equal balanced. 

However, this means that if you've not read any of the Brotherhood books it's harder to understand. All, the characters have already been set up and everything. Though, the history between Butch and Marissa is gone over so readers can remember and understand it, I think if you haven't read their story it can be difficult to get into their relationship. I would have much preferred the Butch and Marissa story to have been in an actual Brotherhood book, but Ward has tied in the plot nicely, so it doesn't feel as jarring. 

The plot is that Paradise gets recruited into the Brotherhood's training program. Finally, she has a chance to prove she's more then just a pretty face! Of course, falling in love was never a part of the plan, but we know from one of the previous Brotherhood book when Paradise and Craeg meet that something is going to happen between them. Paradise and the other recruits have a trail to get through and of course she and Craeg pass and then like so do three other guys. Then they begin their training. Alongside this is Butch's story and he's having problems in his marriage - basically it's a communication break down brought on by a problem in the past. 

The characters are really good and do feel realistic with their true to life problems. There is a good develop for all of them too, with Butch and Marissa overcoming their problems to save their marriage and Paradise and Craeg overcome their barriers and let the love between them grow. Time is spend with some of the other characters, but not much becomes of them due to the fact there's so many and they each have their own novels. 

Overall, this novel is good and fits well into the Brotherhood series and its nice to see different and new characters. I still would have liked it if this novel had just been about them though as then it would be easier for new readers to pick up and there'd also be less focus on the Brotherhood. Hopefully, this might come through more in other books in the series. I'm looking forward to reading to reading the second one now and also the next Brotherhood book, I think it might have all ready come out but I'm still awaiting it. 

Thanks for reading.           

Book Review: The Shadows by J. R. Ward.

Hi readers, 

It's the first book review of the new year! I was hoping to have finished this book and got it up sooner, but it's been a hard slog. Which is a bit off for me because I love J .R. Ward and her Black Dagger Brotherhood, but this novel which is number 13 in the series, had issues. I know when I read The King (which I didn't review for whatever reason) and Lover At Last (http://hailscrazyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/lover-at-last-review.html) I spotted a few problems and though Ward seems to have cut down her plot lines in Shadows, there's still a hell of a lot going on. 

As normal, I'll try and not spoil anything, though reading the book's blurb does give away the key points to the main plot. I guess to draw you in? But knowing straight off that the main female character is going to die doesn't draw me in that well. Reading about the how and why does though.

So, this time we get the story of the two Shadow brothers, who have appeared throughout the series and most of their back stories are all ready known. Trez and Serena finally get to be together, though they time is very limited as she dying. It's a genetic disease that is incurable and though most of the other characters spend all the books time searching for one, nothing is found to help her. Whilst, iAm meets the female he's destined to be with, though she's not as she seems. For me, not enough time is spent getting to know her, really. Maybe, there'll be another book about them, but it didn't feel like there was going to be at the end.

I was really getting into the whole romance between T and S and I kept thinking that something would happen so that she wouldn't have to die. I was waiting for the twist right up till the no return point and then after reading Rhage's thoughts about how he got to be with his Mary though she was human and dying, made me think about why this time Ward had decided not to let her main lovers be together. That is the massive spoiler and downside to this novel. I was reading a few reviews that other people had done on Goodreads and they said that Ward had stated that though she didn't want things to happen they way they did, the characters told her it had to be so. And I just don't get that. Why have all the other books have happy endings and not this one?

Throughout all the other books bringing the two main characters together has been the first plot point. In the earlier books this could always be seen and how the two lovers overcame their problems to be with each other was always interesting. Somehow there has always been a fix, (expect for Tor and Wellsie) and things have always worked out. So, why when clearly Trez and Serena were meant to be together they didn't get their happy ending? Maybe, because Ward didn't want all her books to end the same why or maybe the death was needed to shake up all the characters? Whatever, the case, it just doesn't work and left me feeling unsatisfied.

After going on a long heartbreaking trip with Trez and Serena, where she does a bucket list of events and really enjoys life, I really got to connect with her as a character. As a reader you invest time and energy into these characters and when the ending is rolling around you want to feel like they are going to end on a high note. Instead, I felt let down by the ending as we are left with Trez trying to deal with the loss of his lover and seeing that he has to repay his brother back for supporting him throughout everything. iAm on the other hand, gets to be with his love! How unfair does that feel to Trez? (Plus, given my return to single status, I really wanted that happy ending for them!) I now hope that Trez can have another chance at love with someone else soon.

So, what are the other problems with The Shadows? I felt that overall the book was just too long. There was stuff that could have been cut. Like do we need to know about the drug trading going on between the vampires and lessers? The lesser war really felt it had slipped to the sidelines this time around too. Those plot points felt lost between the lovers and Rhage struggling to sort himself out. The Band Of B* story and what's happening between Xcor and Layla did keep distracting me in a good way because I really want to know what's going to happen between them, but I feel they are going to need their own book to tell that story. The ending also just felt too neat. Things fell into place quickly in the last hundred pages or so with the wrap up to some of the plot points seemingly too loose.

I still really enjoyed this book though and do like how Ward has created individual and dynamic characters. They all feel so different to me even though there's so many of them. The use of dialogue is just great too and I like how there's lots of slag and male language because it makes it feel more realistic. The sex scenes work fine for me too and I always feel so immersed in the world of the BDB. If you've not read the books I would so recommend them. They put vampires in a different light and it works.

In the future though and as I have heard a small rumor about, I would love for Ward and the BDB to return to the formatting they had at the very beginning. I feel that if the overloading of characters and their stories carries on and if the more then six plot points keep happening, the series is just going to die. Which would be a shame because I really really like the novels, but I'm just so tried of having to read tombs of books where I can see stuff that could have easily been cut or moved to another book. Ward writings does seem to be falling and I can only hope it picks up soon and we see better novels coming out of her.           

So what's next for The Black Dagger Brotherhood? 

There's a spin off series, Legacy. The first book is already available to buy, but not for me as I want it in paperback. That won't be out till June, so I shall have to wait. (I could get it in hardback but I've very limited room at the moment and well, it won't fit in with the other BDB books and that'd bug me). I do know that the story is going to follow Paradise, a new female character that was introduced in The Shadows and I'd got interested in. Shame, I have to wait so long to read her story though.  

Then there's this: book 14. Which I just stumbled upon whilst getting the image for Blood Kiss. So, once again when I was kinda thinking that Ward was actually finishing up with the main brotherhood, I was wrong. Which now makes the loose ends of the Lessers, Layla's twins, the Band of B* and why there was a lot of focus on Rhage more into context. I've no doubt that this book will pick up where The Shadows left the story and reading the blurb, it looks like The Beast is going to to be all about Rhage. Which should be great for me because he is my favorite brother! This novel comes out in April, but it'll be October for me. 

Thanks for reading. Please feel free to like, leave a comment or share this post. Also, please check out my other links below.  


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Lover At Last Review

Hey readers, 

I thought I'd do a final book review of the year and what better book to pick then the one I've just finished reading and waited for much of the year to get my hands on. J. R. Ward's eleventh book in her Black Dagger Brotherhood series, Lover At Last. At came out in March, but I had to wait for October for the paper back version and then I had to find the time to read it. LAL totals in at 199,807 words, 696 pages, 84 chapters and about 14 different story lines to follow. 

I've been a massive fan of Ward since I picked up the first BDB book, Dark Lover. She, like Anne Rice are my favorite vampire writers. They both have captured all sides of the vampire and have created fantastic and ever changing worlds for them to live in. Whilst, Rice has always drawn me with the exploits of Lestat and his companions, Ward draws me with her characters' quests for true love. However, whilst reading LAL the question of 'when does a series start to loss it?' came to mind. So, I thought whilst I wrote this I'd try and answer that question based on my review.

Just in case you didn't know the BDB series is about a group of warrior vampires living in New York. They're job is to protect the vampire king and the vampire population from their enemies the Lessers. Each book tells the story of a different BDB vampire with the main focus being on them finding their eternal lovers. The subplots include that vampire having to overcome their past and the ongoing war with the Lessers. In some of the other books there are other subplots to do with other characters which then continue to appear.   

The main plot of LAL involves the series' gay lovers; Quinn and Blay finally getting together and announcing their love for each other. For fans it has been a long awaited event as this love story has appeared as a subplot in a few of the other books. So, even though the end result is clear, it's how it comes about that's meant to be the part worth reading. I won't spoil it, but I will say that this love story follows the same pattern as the others. Both lovers have to come to terms with their past and let go of that so they can be together.

However, if you are or were expecting the focus to be just on Quinn and Blay, with a little bit of Lesser war and some other vampire having problems, then it's tough luck. There are so many other subplots and characters that appear, that just distracted from the lovers too much. I, like many other fans wanted Quinn and Blay to get more page time. Yes, we already knew a lot about them from the other books and maybe there wasn't much more that could be told about their past, but I just didn't get into their love story as much as I wanted too. Maybe it was because I was getting involved in a more exciting love story unfolding?

Here's a list of the subplots I found. I might be missing one or two though as there was so many!

Quinn and Layla. 

Quinn and Luchas  

Layla and Xcor 

Xcor and Elan 

Assail and Sola 

Assail and his cousins

Assail and the lessers 

Assail and the band of bastards  

Trez and iAm

Trez and his past

Trez and Selena 

The Lessers 

The Band of Bastards

And it would be so easy for me to sit here and write about them all but I won't because it'd take too long and be boring. I will talk about Layla and Xcor though, because it was the one subplot that got me really interested. I want to know what's going to happened between them now. Ward made it clear they were in love and wanted to be together - Xcor more though- but with Layla having Quinn's baby and Xcor being her sworn enemy and also of the Brotherhood, are they actually going to be able to be together in the next book?

It took me awhile to get back into the language used in this novel. I do love the way Ward has captured all the different accents though. The BDB are all very American whilst Xcor and the Chosen have old English sounding voices. There is also the vampire language making an appearance again, though it's got an English translation, but you can still hear how it should sound in the words she's used. I like also how the character's dialogue is transferred into there actions and that the language doesn't just go back to being in a normal descriptive one.

There are so many themes in this novel, but the main ones are love, loyalty, family, friendship and death. These all intertwine with the different plots and characters. It is very easy to syntheses with these themes and the characters as they are common in all readers' lives. The themes also keep the plots going and help to create the conflicts that are needed.

So, all that has brought us back around to the question I raised at the beginning. When does a series start to loss it? Well, for me it feels like Ward is losing it with LAL. There's just too much packed in and I felt that it wasn't all needed. She could easily have written a spin off book about some of the other things going on. In fact her other series about angels does that in someways. (I've yet to read it.) I get that she needed this book to be different from the others in the series as its clear there is some winding down of things, but with all these other characters' developing, I'm not so sure that the next book will be the last one. A series of course can go on for however long the writer, publishers and the demand for it wants and is present. That doesn't mean that every book is actually going to be good. Sometimes it can be important to stop early on or else when there comes a natural stopping moment. Though of course you leave the reader knowing that the characters and the world continue in someway.

I guess it didn't help that I thought this was the last book when I started reading it. Ward's writing is still very good, but due to the amount of plots and characters, it sometimes feels like this novel is all over the place. I will admit that at points I did get confused with Assail and Xcor and their plots. Maybe in a way this novel is just trying too hard and there was no need for Ward to that. Of course my question is difficult to answer because everyone will have their own opinions. I hope that the next book, The King, turns out better.

Image from:

http://areadersreviewblog.com/2013/07/

Websites used: 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/

http://www.goodreads.com/

http://www.scandaliciousbookreviews.com/2013/03/28/review-lover-at-last-by-j-r-ward/

Writing Stories

Hi,  I thought today I’d write a slightly different blog. Which should be good for me because I’m having a writer’s block with writing my essays. Truthfully, I’m not sure why, but I’ve some different theories; 1. the fact I’ve a loan laptop and the keyboard is strange and I don’t have any of my stuff on here, (Also just found out that nothing could be saved on my hard drive, so I’ve lost everything on that. Have new hard drive and getting laptop back tomorrow though.) 2. I’ve lots of other thoughts in my head right now and I can’t rid of them. 3. the idea of leaving Uni is scary! 4. I want my final essays to be really good. 5. I’m stressing about other things too now. So, yeah that’s about it, so I’m hoping to snap out of it soon!

So I might have writer’s block on my essays, but I’ve not on my novels. I’ve been writing one I started last yearish and the idea was that the reader was on the outside looking in, so they were always at a distance from the world and characters. Thus means that I and the characters are in the same boat, on the outside, not sure what’s going on or who to trust. It’s working out really well tho in a strange way and it’s not really about vampires!

Doing a creative writing course has taught me all about the craft of writing, but not really ‘how to write’ that comes from practice, experience and your own talent and imagination. Reading and writing every day is an important part of it too! Plus you have to love doing it and writing for yourself. That’s how I got into it really, writing as a hobby and often in reply to books I had just finished reading. I strongly believe as well that having a really good or over active imagination helps too. I’ve always had one, mostly because I was a bit of loner for most of my childhood and thus creating worlds and make believe friends was a great comfit for me. I also believe if you want it badly enough you should go after it and for me being a novelist would be my dream come true. I already know, from my course, that getting something published and making it popular in the world is hard to do and seriously not as easy as most people believe it to be. This is due to the fact that publishing is like any other business and they always want to make money.

Moving on and focusing on me for a min, I started writing stories when I was 6, but because I was dyslexic (I didn’t know officially till I was 16) no one knew what I was going on about, but I got a taste for writing, though it was so tough for me! But I loved reading and books, thanks to my parents. Then when I was 12 I found inspiration from R .L. Steins’ Goosebumps stories and  wrote my first novel part in high school, part at home. The only evidence I have of that novel is a single paper copy. From there though and without any guidance or anything, I took that novel and redraft it. From there was born the first in a series of novels about a group of teenagers who went to a summer camp every year and I wrote like 10 novels. Then I got writer’s block and wrote nothing for a year.

Sorry, I’m so going off on something here, but it’ll explain things in a minute. Sometime whilst I was in college during my second year a character suddenly popped into my head and so was born my first official vampire. I then spent the next two years of my college life writing 3 novels about this vampire and his friends.

So, and I only discovered this by reading J .R. Ward’s The Black Dagger Brotherhood; The Insider’s guide, which is a great great book! That my characters would come into my head and start mapping out their own stories. Thus all my novels are driven by the character not the plot. Like Ward, I also see the images of my characters, their actions and their worlds in my head and that really helps when you’re writing a story. Being able to see images so that the words become more like pictures in your mind is a great skill to have.

I’d tell anyone to give writing in any form a shot and see how you feel about. I’m still surprised when my friends talk about something I’ve wrote and tell me that they couldn’t have written something like that or where did my idea come from. Just because for awhile I believed that I didn’t have a talent for writing, but now of course I do. So I think that giving some thing new a try and seeing if you have a knack for it is really good.

So, where do you now begin if you want to write a story? Well, the blank page bugs me, so I always try and fill it really fast. Often I’ll start with the weather- either outside or a make it up. Like ‘it was a bright sunny morning’ and then make the setting or add a character, ‘the street was quiet and the gentle breeze was blowing through the cherry blossom trees.’ then it’s character/setting, ‘Laura walked down the street, glancing up at each house as she past. What was the number again? she thought.’ so I’ve got my character’s thoughts now, but you can have speech too and now to hook the reader into the story (This is highly important to grab the reader so they’ll read on for sure!) ‘she paused before garden gate and bit her lip, how am I going to tell him? she thought and dropped a hand to her stomach, that I’m pregnant?’

See? you’re drawn into that now ’cause you want to know more about both characters and what they are going to do about the situation. I made that up on the spot too, as an example but also to do away with the white space on the page! And of course there are lots of different ways to get started and lots of guide books on writing out there. So give it a try!

PS. I might think about making my idea into a short story and posting it on here if I get enough people commenting with their interest, so get in touch, cause I do read them all- even tho right now I’ve over 5,000 to read! So bear with me but thanks for the support everyone!

More coming soon!

Rocking the Summer house!

It's been awhile since I've been able to say 'Yes, I really loved that book, I'm adding it to my fav list right now.' I've been reading so many books for eng lit and just been suffering because of it. I've been bored out of my head by these Victorian books, which just goes to show how the writers' believed novels had to be written to certain rules and things like love must be hidden under different words so that people wouldn't be horrified by such exposed things. Well, I finally decided to take a break from them- I was at the halfway point anyway and by chance I picked up a book I brought in my last trip to Liverpool - J .R. Ward's Lover Eternal. It blew my mind away and showed me how much novels have become exposed now -you can get away with just about everything now days if a publisher likes it!

I hardly put it down, because I got so wrapped up in things. Then when I read the last page, I discovered it was the 2nd in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series. I got on Amazon fast and grabbed the 1st and 3rd. I'd brought the 2nd to last one with Eternal, so I just need to get my hands on the others now. I've decided to take these two on holiday, as well as the 3rd in the Sliver/Flint pirates of Treasure Island books I've been reading-The 1st made it to my fav list. I was meant to take Wuthering Heights-the next in my Eng lit books away with me, but the thought of sitting on a beach trying to read that doesn't seem so good to me.

I've nothing against these novels, I'm a bookworm, but sometimes these types of books just don't grab me....vampires however do!

The summer house

I'm currently chilling out in the summer house at the minute. Well its more of a DIY, pop up place, because my dad made it out of a gazebo house and also a smaller gazebo, some wood, plastic sheeting, so bricks and old sofa cushions. So though it does look little untidy, it is the perfect place to hang out in-sun or rain! Its cool, but warm at the same time and it does leak but only in a heavy rainfall. The bench chairs are so comfy though and there is a table, power plug for laptop and a speaker which links to the Hifi system in the shed. There are lights too and a pool/snooker table. No one could really ask for a better place in which to chill out in when it gets too hot on the grass or the lawn chair breaks again. It's bigger then the photo makes it and just right for taking a nap in.

Inside the summer house.

*

Lastly, this is a photo of Hairy von Baron Strawberry. His name came from a joke and a misunderstanding. He is a barren Strawberry plant and I misunderstood this and thought he was a baron instead, then his first name comes from the fact he was very hairy when I got him. So I just stuck all of that together and so he was named! My best friend, who give him to me, said he wouldn't get strawberries this year because he was just a baby......well, it seems he didn't listen to that because now he has 6 strawberries growing and he also seems to have got more leaves. So he must be older then she thought or he likes his spot in my garden so much that he's just grown up! Anyway, I'm hoping to have some home grown strawberries in late summer!