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serynI finished the tome that was J.R. Ward's latest, Lover Avenged. These books read like fanfic. I don't mean that derogatorially; I run across a lot of really well organized/edited/produced fanfic. But there is the sense that we have to hold hands with every character and play with every toy and we absolutely cannot possibly stray from the stylistic norms that were set before.
I read a review before I read the book (if you care, it was the one on the Dear Author blog) and that reviewer was put off by the slang and abbreviations and jargon. I wasn't usually, but there were some that bothered me, like referring to clothing by a nickname of the designer's label. At one point Wrath is undressing his mate and the narrator says he couldn't wait to remove her Sevens. WTF? She's got a half-Borg twat-adapter? Some of it is irritating like grown up vampires (hundreds of years old) who say things like "I'm outtie." Er, what? I think that's a sound-it-out for a Joisey accented "outta-here".
It was 600 pages. As far as I can tell, Ehlena meets her vampire, and even though she's seen him off and on for decades, suddenly it clicks for her. That was actually adequately explained, which is a shocker for any genre romance where usually people go around expecting to fall in love. We wander around for several hundred pages wherein nothing happens. Several couples have sex "on screen" and we-the-readers get to watch because the narrator is a perv who is easily distracted by voyeurism and can't be arsed to stick to the story. So although the romance between Rehv and Ehlena is pretty straight forward... nurse girl meets sick vampire and tries to make him better, so he pretends to kill himself and gets captured, so the girl rescues him. It takes an unholy amount of time while we watch Wrath wring his hands over his office furniture choices (I am not exaggerating. He touches his chair and desk and stuff then holds his own hand afterward.)
I did find the lack of Brotherhood activity to be a let down. But of course I found the Brotherhood stuff to be intrusive in the previous books. I did really like how alien the vampires seemed in this. Lusty vampires beg their partners to "take my vein", and there were several scenes where vampires were watching a purely human activity and were noting how strange it was. But. If you've not been in a church, you're not a Christian, you don't associate with people who are, why would you say "Jesus Christ" as a curse? And they all do it. Previous books have the vampires consistently swearing by their Virgin Scribe, but we met VS in the previous book and she's really useless, so maybe they're all going to convert? But I found it really irksome and mismatched with my sense of their culture.
That is something I liked, when I started reading Ward's series (I started in the middle), there wasn't any explanation as to what was similar or different. We just watched and these semi-alien creatures who like X-Box had a story. That is, precisely, my favorite part about science fiction and fantasy.
I read a review before I read the book (if you care, it was the one on the Dear Author blog) and that reviewer was put off by the slang and abbreviations and jargon. I wasn't usually, but there were some that bothered me, like referring to clothing by a nickname of the designer's label. At one point Wrath is undressing his mate and the narrator says he couldn't wait to remove her Sevens. WTF? She's got a half-Borg twat-adapter? Some of it is irritating like grown up vampires (hundreds of years old) who say things like "I'm outtie." Er, what? I think that's a sound-it-out for a Joisey accented "outta-here".
It was 600 pages. As far as I can tell, Ehlena meets her vampire, and even though she's seen him off and on for decades, suddenly it clicks for her. That was actually adequately explained, which is a shocker for any genre romance where usually people go around expecting to fall in love. We wander around for several hundred pages wherein nothing happens. Several couples have sex "on screen" and we-the-readers get to watch because the narrator is a perv who is easily distracted by voyeurism and can't be arsed to stick to the story. So although the romance between Rehv and Ehlena is pretty straight forward... nurse girl meets sick vampire and tries to make him better, so he pretends to kill himself and gets captured, so the girl rescues him. It takes an unholy amount of time while we watch Wrath wring his hands over his office furniture choices (I am not exaggerating. He touches his chair and desk and stuff then holds his own hand afterward.)
I did find the lack of Brotherhood activity to be a let down. But of course I found the Brotherhood stuff to be intrusive in the previous books. I did really like how alien the vampires seemed in this. Lusty vampires beg their partners to "take my vein", and there were several scenes where vampires were watching a purely human activity and were noting how strange it was. But. If you've not been in a church, you're not a Christian, you don't associate with people who are, why would you say "Jesus Christ" as a curse? And they all do it. Previous books have the vampires consistently swearing by their Virgin Scribe, but we met VS in the previous book and she's really useless, so maybe they're all going to convert? But I found it really irksome and mismatched with my sense of their culture.
That is something I liked, when I started reading Ward's series (I started in the middle), there wasn't any explanation as to what was similar or different. We just watched and these semi-alien creatures who like X-Box had a story. That is, precisely, my favorite part about science fiction and fantasy.
