Black Dagger Brotherhood

By J.R. Ward
Read: April-May 2009
Rating: Cool

My mom got me hooked on these. She bought the whole Black Dagger Brotherhood series (1-6) and she immersed herself in them for about a week. Then she passed them on to me.

Good, solid books. Not perfect, but few things are. As a whole, the series is delicious. It’s smart, snarky, and full of badass. Or, rather, badasses.

Wrath is the nearly blind vampire king who has evaded assuming his throne.

Rhage carries within him a beast that can shred men and buildings to their basest components.

Zsadist was kept as a slave until all softness was stolen from him.

Butch has never felt alive or truly welcomed… until he fell in with a bunch of deadly vampire warriors.

Vicious was left an unwelcome legacy by the parents he never knew.

Phury has lived his life trying to rescue others, until he himself is all but drowning.

Did I mention that they’re all well over 6ft, covered in muscle, some with tattoos, and they kick frickin’ ASS? And I haven’t even hinted at the secondary cast yet.

So, what do you get for handing your reading time over to a bunch of vampire warriors? You get very intelligent men. You get heroines who aren’t total numbskulls. They’re in the middle of a war, so there’s urgency and violence… and really bone-chilling villains. The males are primal–nothing prissy here, it’s animalistic drive tempered by whole0body devotion.

Thumbnail image by: http://aidang.deviantart.com/art/Black-Dagger-Brotherhood-117169033

And Ms. Ward is damn good at the smex.

Sure, the funky spellings are a bit irritating (I swear, inserting an extra ‘h’ into normal words just to make them ‘foreign’ should be illegal). And sometimes the guys sound a tch juvenile. If you read them all at once, you’re going to recognize the same speech patterns used over and over… But it’s all good. I am willing to forgive all that as long as I GET TO READ THE REST.

Cuz these books… they ain’t yo’ normal romance series. Most romances you can pick up and put down in any damn order and it really doesn’t make much of a difference. That’s not Ward’s MO at all. No, she starts setting up the next book at least halfway through the one before it. By the time you finish one you are slavering for the next. The arcs last across several books, in different arrangements, so it doesn’t feel formulaic. It happens the way life happens.

And they are SO GOOD for that.

I will say that Zsadist is my fave.