Kerry Allen

Lover Unbound by J.R. Ward
Mass Market Paperback, 502 pages
ISBN: 0451222350
Available Now
Retail Price $7.99
Fifth in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series

(I feel my commentary is superfluous at this point, since the interwebs will do everything but tuck you in and read the book to you for a bedtime story, but being superfluous has never stopped me before, so here goes.)

Vishous is the Brotherhood’s tech expert. He has a glowing hand of death and a pied-a-terre where he ties up his dates and shags ‘em rotten, baby. His sole emotional attachment is to his roomie, Butch—newly wed, newly transformed into a vamp, and dependent on V’s magic hand for a spiritual colonic after he sucks the sludge out the nasty Lessers.

V gets a visit from the Scribe Virgin, who reveals the identity of his heretofore unknown mama and lays the future of the Brotherhood on his grudging shoulders. She wants a Brother to come to Virginland and knock up all forty of the Chosen to ensure another generation of warriors. Since his life is in the shitter and there’s nothing for him in this world, V agrees to be the prize stud. Ensuring the survival of his race is a reason to live, at least.

In a pissy mood after the SV’s visit, he goes out hunting Lessers on his own, drops his guard, and gets shot in the heart.

Dr. Jane is an ambitious trauma surgeon who intends to leave behind her nonexistent social life, her joyless apartment, and her go-nowhere job to head up her own department elsewhere. A freak of nature with fangs, an unidentifiable blood type, and a bullet in his six-chambered heart ends up under her knife. She’s so excited about the latter, I was a little surprised she didn’t dissect him on the spot, but she’s a good doc and patches up all his boo-boos instead, saving his miserable life.

V wakes up while Jane’s boss is propositioning her across his hospital bed, and his first thought is “Mine… And if you touch her, I’m going to bite your godforsaken arm off at the socket.” Possessive bunch, the Brothers, so when his homies come to retrieve him before the humans figure out what he is and V says he’s not leaving without his doc, Hollywood slings her over his shoulder and hauls her back to the compound. King Wrath wants her removed immediately but is persuaded V needs continued medical attention that only she can provide because Havers is such a bitch.

Jane feels a duty to her patient, but she’s pissed about being abducted and arms herself and gets mouthy with V, who has dominance issues and thinks she needs to be taught a lesson about obedience—a naked, sweaty, Richter-triggering lesson unlike anything either of them has experienced before.

The need to take care of Jane is foreign to V, as is the desire to give her something of himself. The dude recognizes the symptoms of falling in love, having watched almost every dude around him succumb to the same malady within the past couple of months.

Too bad he promised to be the Chosen’s whoreboy and can’t keep the love of his life for more than a weekend.

I cannot go on without addressing some of the “issues” raised elsewhere. I’m pretty sure the rest of this is spoiler-free (if you’ve somehow managed to remain unsullied), but just in case, it’s below the fold and just vague enough to confuse you. If you’ve read the book, you’ll understand my vague references just fine.

First, I’m not JRW’s squeeing fangirl. I don’t hang out on her message boards (or anyone else’s, for that matter—all that speculation ruins books for me, among other deterrents). I don’t think she can do no wrong. Here are some examples where I feel she goes awry:

• I don’t understand the reincarnation thing. Didn’t Darius die just recently? Then how did he end up in a fully grown (or nearly) John?
• The deliberate misspelling is a fishhook in the eye when I come across it in the text. Why the hell wouldn’t vampires be able to spell? If my public school-educated sixth grader can spell these words correctly, so should… anybody. If it was another language, I’d be fine, but it’s just bastardized English. If my soul didn’t rebel at the defacing of books, I’d rip the glossary out and spare myself the visual and intellectual insult.
• The female characters tend to be one-dimensional wraiths whose only purpose for existing is to give the Brothers somebody to fall in lurrrrve with. Here’s what I remember about the heroines I read about less recently than this morning: Beth (Darius’s daughter), Mary (leukemia, and she answered phones at some kind of hotline), Bella (was she the rich one?), Marisa (the ultimate dishrag). I could write you an essay on each of the Brothers (and Rehv and Havers and John and every other dude who’s ever shown his face), but that’s all I got on the ladies, and this degree of disinterest in the heroine goes far beyond my typical “I like the heroes best” mindset. There’s just not much substance to these women.
• I do think the Brothers’ size issues are expounded upon to a grotesque degree, so much so that I ignore them completely. I was startled in Book 3 or 4 to read Rhage is the most physically imposing of the bunch. He’s my favorite, and while imagining him too pretty to look straight at without suffering retinal damage, I’m definitely not superimposing him on Andre the Giant. I have my own idea of tall, broad, and built to whoop evil ass, so don’t interrupt me with freakshow measurements, m’kay?

See? I can find fault. However, I’m finding less of it with Lover Unbound than most people seem to be. Which, now that I’ve gone back to my policy of not reading about books that interest me because I never agree with anyone, I realize is fine. One’s reaction to a book is an intensely personal thing, and one is entitled to it, whatever it may be. So I’m no longer hostile, though I do feel obligated to respond to some of what I feel is unfair criticism.

As for V and Jane’s story taking a back seat to everything else that was going on with Phury and John and everybody else… I skipped all the non-V parts on the second read. I didn’t count pages, but it took as long to read as the average 300- to 350-page novel. When you have a 502-page book, you get lots of bonus material. Frankly, if 500 pages were focused exclusively on one couple, I’d be sick of them before I got to the end.

As for Bella being an insensitive bitch to Phury… Well, you’re dead-on there. There was no excuse for shoving herself under his nose constantly. “I feel bad for him, so I’m going to torture him” just doesn’t fly with me. Skanky little troublemaker. Z deserves better.

As for the Chosen being creepy… I’ll give you that one, too. I can’t stand them. The fact that it’s not their fault they’re a bunch of dishrags doesn’t change the fact that they’re a bunch of dishrags. A whole book of Phury surrounded by their zombielike listlessness will be agonizing. (And I can just imagine how well the polygamy will go over if people thought this one was a travesty of romance…)

As for Jane breezily going along with V’s kink when it was not her thing… I believed Jane could do the role reversal that V demanded of her because I found his reasoning perfectly persuasive. She did have reservations, but she did it because he needed it. Also, since he essentially directed the whole production, it can’t be said he suddenly tossed 300 years of dominance tendencies out the window—he made Jane do exactly what he wanted without laying a hand on her.

As for the critical Lesser appearance “coming out of nowhere”… Come on. Who didn’t know what was going on next door? I was pissed at V at one point because he didn’t put it together as quickly as I thought he should. He’s so protective of Jane when it comes to his friends, but the actual threat to her completely eludes him. I’ll cut him some slack because he had some trouble keeping blood circulating to his upper brain, but the reader should have seen the Here there be Lessers bearing down like a runaway minivan early on.

As for Jane’s fate not being previously set up as a possibility… The Scribe Virgin is literally a deus ex machina device. She has done the unexpected before, resolving the unresolvable with a flick of her petite little fingers. That’s one of the perks of having godlike power. When she told V it was not within her power to give that particular gift, she meant it. She had to appeal to a higher power, which she did for Jane but not for Wells because of her relationship with V.

“Since when is there a higher power? Nobody ever said anything about a higher power before!” There is always a higher power. I take it as a given, but if you require a setup, let’s look at the Omega. If the SV was the be-all-and-end-all, wouldn’t she just smite the Omega and his lackeys so her bloodsuckers could live in peace? She didn’t seem to be particularly afraid of the Omega the one time they faced off, so it seems more a matter of restriction than inability—more “rules” she’s not allowed to break. Somebody had to make the rules, yes? Yes. Higher power.

As for the outrage over the nontraditional ending… I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: At the end, V can put his hands on Jane just like he always could. Jane has to “concentrate” to perform certain tasks, but doesn’t everyone when they’re adjusting to change? (Try switching to an ergonomic keyboard—or back to a standard one—and tell me you don’t have to fucking concentrate on typing skills you mastered back in the sixth grade. Just that tiny adjustment of the angle of your arms will slow you down for at least a couple of weeks. Jane was handling her rather more significant adjustment far more deftly.) She carries through with her plans to be the Bro’s live-in doc, so clearly her fine motor skills progress enough to allow her to wield pointy objects with confidence. Only a week has elapsed by the epilogue. In a month, her condition will be her new baseline.

I continue to insist Together + Happy = Traditional HEA. V put a finer point on it: “But who the fuck cared? They had each other.” Right on, brutha. True.

The moral of the story: Love changes you in ways you could never anticipate. (*snicker*)

The laugh-out-loud moment: John’s post-trans craving for chocolate and bacon. Together. Why is that funny? Because I’ve had that conversation, years and years ago. It went something like this:

Me: Omigod. Chocolate-covered bacon would be the perfect food.

DD: Eww.

Me: How could it be bad? It’s chocolate and bacon, the two most delicious things known to mankind.

DD: You have a point.

So I’m saying it’s a worthy addition to the series, not as dear to my heart as Lover Eternal, but far better than Lover Revealed—and even as much as I can’t stand Butch or Marissa, I can’t say that was a bad book because J.R. Ward tells a hell of a story.