Lover Eternal

I enjoyed this 2nd book of the Brotherhood series much better than book one. The characters somehow developed to a more understandable level. Book one felt a little more focused on the battles and violence than the second one. I loved the story of Rhage & Mary. Their relationship took off almost from the beginning but didn't feel forced. I guess we just love a tormented, beautiful, muscle-ripped hero to "fix". I love it when the unassuming one is the "fix".

I laughed at times at the dialogue and Mary's thoughts. There was a definite "awwww" and "ahhhhh" at the end of this book. I'm glad the author keeps us up to date with the other characters from book one. I like a good progressing series. I look forward to reading Z's story. It should show more be a doozy! show less

Oh, my, this book is STEAMY!!

I thought this book was so much better than the first in the series, Dark Lover.

It appears that Ward is featuring a different member of the Black Dagger Brotherhood with each of her novels. In Dark Lover, it was all about Wrath. This book is all about Rhage aka Hollywood, the most attractive of the Brotherhood who needs to take women and fight Lessers in order to keep his beast (literally) at bay.

I could not help visualizing that Rhage looked like Eric Northman of True Blood.

Rhage falls for a woman, Mary Luce, a plain-Jane type who feels that she is completely undeserving of a man as beautiful as Rhage. She finds it very hard to accept that his feelings and desires are genuine, and even his Brothers find it show more hard to believe that he has found someone he wishes to be with for always.

The transformation of Rhage from a womanizer to someone so tender-hearted was utterly beautiful. The sacrifices that he made over and over for Mary had me weeping.

Ward has such a beautiful way with words. One of my favourite quotes from the book was from Rhage to Mary: “I'm a vampire. I'm a warrior. I'm a dangerous beast. At the end of this evening, you aren't going to remember you ever met me. And the idea of not even being a memory of yours makes me feel like I've been stabbed in the chest.”

Did I mention that this book was STEAMY? I think it deserves to be mentioned again! I am not the type of woman who enjoys romances, but there is something about the paranormal romances that leaves me breathless, and Ward sure knows how to turn up the intensity! This book was HOT!

Jim Frangione did a superb job with the narration. His voice is rich with emotion, and I just love his "Fritz" voice! So endearing!

MY RATING: 5 stars!! I know that I am going to pick this one up and read it again! show less

I really liked this one. JR Ward is an amazing writer. I liked the new characters introduced, including John Matthew and Bella, and especially liked the romance heating up between Zsadist and Bella.

Reread 2020-Some of this may be spoilery for later books since it’s a reread and it’s hard to unknow what I know from 20 books into the series now. So many things I had forgotten since the last time I read this book! Butch is such a clothes horse! It’s also so funny to read about Mary and Bella out in the real (human) world after having read later books in the series where they later live at the mansion. I am so digging Mary’s awesome farmhouse. And oh gosh, can I just say how much I love vintage Tohrment? I miss that dude so much! show more And the early scenes with Mary and John Matthew. I have always loved John Matthew, and these were great scenes. I love how JR Ward writes her characters with disabilities.

The crafting of this one was great—Mary in the dark because she’s a human, but needed to be a translator for John Matthew. Rhage under orders to wipe her memory even as he’s falling for her. Bella keeping the secret that she’s also a vampire. And of course, Mary’s cancer and what this means for her future. I love the way the conflict with the Lessers in these early books is so intense. Also the way the Brotherhood is slowly coming around to the idea of more humans in their midst, Butch, the now-vampire Beth, and now Mary, is delightful. And oooo… my favorite part… the lead in to Zsadist and Bella… show less

Originally posted here

I hate to say this but I really did not ship Rhage and Mary. Just no. I don't understand what happened. Following the same formula as Dark Lover, the focus of this book is on another brother in the brotherhood, Rhage. Rhage is eye-hurt beautiful and he is a bit of a man whore. He also has a curse that results in him turning into a dragon like creature when hurt or angry. For some unknown reason he becomes obsessed when he claps eyes on Mary, who is a human plain jane who has leukaemia. Am I the only reader who thinks that vampires are wasting their time with humans? Vampires are slowly going extinct so I really don't think that a vampire warrior needs to be wasted on a human and a barren human at that. But anyway, show more I am well aware that suspension of logic and belief is a must when reading this series, and I'm usually fine with that but I just hated the pairing in this one.

I didn't like the transformation of Rhage into a soppy, lovesick fool and I cringed when I read the romance between him and Mary. That aside, I really enjoyed learning more about the vampire world. John Matthew is really intriguing to me and I enjoyed his POVs. I am really excited to read about Zsadist and Bella's budding relationship as the interactions between them were one of the best bits about this whole book. I even liked the lesser POVs more than I liked reading about Rhage and Mary.

That ending though.... I am not a fan. I don't understand why the Scribe Virgin did that. What's the point? I would have much preferred it to have gone the opposite way. I know the point of these books is primarily that the characters all get their one true pairings but seriously, can vampires only have the one mate and never fall in love again? One thing is for sure though, reading this series is incredibly addictive. I just can't stop. I definitely feel different about this book than I did first time around but I am holding out hope for the series to pick up with the next instalment Lover Awakened. show less

I gave this book 4 stars because I sincerely think the next book will be even better. I liked the first one, _Dark Lover_, and I agree with the other readers that this one is even more compelling. She really creates a world with this series, and as a reader who gave up on romance some years ago (in favor of fantasy), I have to say this series is bringing me back. This isn't your typical Nora Roberts cookie-cutter story. The author has a punchy urban style that has improved markedly between the two books. She creates her own idiom here, like some of the great pulp-fictionists of the past. There are some awkward moments--e.g. it's "wreaked havoc," not "reeked havoc,"--but overall it was good enough to read twice over two days. The women show more in this series are a little flaccid for my taste (pun intended, if you've read the books)--I'd like to see what a really powerful woman would do with these testosterone-flooded vampires--but the world of the Brotherhood is truly seductive. One does need to get over the names. They seem a little silly, and no one seems to notice that they are real words in English--I mean, Wrath, Rhage, Vishous, etc. don't seem to be overly allegorical to anyone in the stories. No one says "Wrath, huh? as in the seven deadly sins?" I pretend they're pronounced Euro-style, and that helps. But as a lit prof who reads a lot of pulp, I have to say this is some of the most promising stuff I've read in awhile. And I swore off vampires after Anne Rice got boring. I can't wait for the next one.. show less

I still don't like the way she names her vamps (heaven help me when it's time to read Phury's story), but once I settled in to the story, it flew by. Ward's good at making her vamp world seem realistic, and she threw in a couple of little twists into the story that I didn't see coming -- always appreciated. While I expected the hero and heroine to end up together, Ward keeps up the overall suspense level by some nifty juggling of multiple plotlines, some of which started in the first book in the series.

Will future books rise to the level of five stars for me? I don't know. Right now she doesn't seem inclined to kill of any of her major characters in the series, which is common in the romance genre but puts a lid on the amount of show more suspense I can feel as I'm reading. She does a good job of showing consequences of people's actions otherwise, but it feels as if there's this one big line she's not willing to cross. We'll see. show less

This review first posted on http://rubysreads.com.

The Black Dagger Brotherhood books are on almost every list of must-read Paranormal Romance. A long time ago, I read Dark Lover, Wrath and Bella’s book and the first installment in the series. I don’t remember a lot about how I felt about Dark Lover but evidently, my feelings didn’t reach the top of the spectrum because I never got around to book two. I’ve been toying with getting reacquainted with the Black Dagger Brotherhood for some time. What I couldn’t decide was whether to reread Dark Lover. In the end, I ran across a list of books featuring wallflower heroines. Lover Eternal was on this list and I decided to stop angsting and start reading.

Sometimes I’ve read books and show more thought they were okay only to pick them up again and find that I didn’t properly appreciate them the first time around. This was my experience with Georgette Heyer. I’d hardly started Frederica before I put it back down again. But years later, when I read and fell in love with Devil’s Cub, I gobbled up most of Heyer’s oeuvre, including Frederica. What I’m saying is that I try to keep an open mind about books that underwhelm me. Sometimes those books are better read at a later point in your life. This isn’t true about all books, of course. It mainly happens with books that numerous people love and recommend but that I just couldn’t get into. However. I’m glad that I didn’t reread Dark Lover. Not because I hated Lover Eternal, but because I’m not particularly eager to keep going with the Black Dagger Brotherhood series. Lover Eternal didn’t appeal to me in any substantial way.

For those of you unfamiliar with the plot, Lover Eternal tells the story of Rhage and Mary Luce. Rhage is a member of the previously mentioned Black Dagger Brotherhood, a group of six warrior vampires that have sworn to protect the vampire race. All the warriors (except the king, Wrath, and Zsadist, whose name is an issue of its own) have names with extra h’s in them: Rhage, Phury, Vishous, Rhevenge, Tohrment, Tehrror. I’m not really sure why, except that I think it’s supposed to indicate how bad-ass they all are. All the brothers have issues, it seems, and Rhage’s is a curse put upon him by the Scribe Virgin. Rhage’s curse comes in the form of a beast that comes out when he’s angry. The only ways that Rhage has found of dealing with the beast are fighting and frequent sex. He’s a different woman every night kind of guy, whether he wants to be or not. Until Mary comes into the picture.

Mary is not so much a wallflower as a woman with low self-esteem. She’s spent a great deal of her life at her mother’s sick bed. Then, when her mother died, Mary was diagnosed with leukemia and was sent to the sickbed herself. When the story begins, Mary receives a call from the doctor that strongly suggests that she’s no longer in remission. Which she’s understandably bummed about. I’ve got to give Ward props for not going with the obvious solution to that particular problem. Mary is believably reluctant to enter into a relationship with Rhage if she’s just going to get sick. She’s been the caretaker for a dying woman and she knows it’s not pretty.

This book was okay, but I had a problem with Rhage’s “curse”. I had read that Rhage had slept with someone else during the course of the book, and I had also read that it didn’t happen after the two got together. This is technically true. Rhage does not sleep with anyone else after he has slept with Mary. But. The two are emotionally committed to each other. Which makes it cheating in my book. I also read that Rhage had to sleep with someone else as a result of his curse. I was a little wary of this argument and now that I’ve read the book, my opinion has not changed. Rhage is afraid of hurting others if he doesn’t keep the beast at bay. Though he knows two ways of doing this, the only thing that really works (in the end) is sex. I wasn’t clear on why it had to be several-different-girls-a-night-sex. I also wasn’t clear why the Scribe Virgin cursed Rhage in that particular way. It didn’t really fit the crime. I felt like it was a convenient excuse for Rhage to be promiscuous without actually wanting to be. It was the Paranormal version of “men have needs”.

The other issue that I had with this novel was that I wanted to giggle over the language of the “brothers”. To me, they sounded like a bunch of white boys playing ganstah. There was lots of “my brothers” and “you feel me?” And what was with the constant use of the word “female”? I hated it. Maybe it just made me think of the term “female dog”? I don’t know. It irritated me. In my head it sounded derogatory rather than, I don’t know, sexy and possessive.

The one thing that did interest me in this novel is the story of the boy whom Mary befriends. Unbeknownst to the boy, John Thomas, he is about to go through his transition (to becoming a vampire). I was interested in seeing where his story went. But I don’t want to read through six more Black Dagger Brotherhood books just to follow it. Maybe I’ll catch it as a stand-alone and maybe I won’t. Sadly, this is not the vampire series for me. show less