Lover Eternal by J.R. Ward

This is the second of the books I read for the challenge. Posted originally to my blog All Booked Up.

Lover Eternal was another five star read. If you haven't tried any of the books by J.R. Ward, and you like this type of book, you really should.

The sequel to Dark Lover, this was another book that I couldn't put down. The characters are gripping and the story moves fast. And the twist at the end... It's a romance novel, but for a while I was wondering as I couldn't see any way for the traditional happy ending.

One thing I'm really enjoying about this series is the way that characters other than the main focus character of the book get their time on the pages as well. The only books I have to compare it to are the Sherrilyn Kenyon Dark Hunter series and the books by Kinley MacGregor, where the characters from the previous books are simply background mentions. Here they are developed and grow preparatory to their own books and the books don't wind up into neat little packages. There's always some loose end to continue into the next book

The villains are downright creepy, although the worst are in the next couple of books (I'm about three ahead of where I'm reviewing now).

There are a couple of things about this series that I don't particularly care for however. The first one I've mentioned before: the way the author has gone about creating the language for the vampires: simply adding an "h" to a word and having it mean the same thing, and doing the same with names. They just seem a bit 'cute'. Still, it doesn't really get in the way of the story. The second is the amount of miscommunication between the main characters. By the third book, there is definitely a pattern and it gets to be a bit much. On the other hand, without it there might not be as much plot there. Overall though, I'm really loving this series, and this book nearly brought me to tears with one or two of the plot twists, such as Rhage's interactions with the Scribe Virgin.

If you like the paranormal romances, give this book a try. It's well worth the money at over four hundred pages and a small to normal font size instead of a large font and larger margins/line spacing.