Review: Blood Kiss by J.R. Ward

Blood Kiss
(Black Dagger Legacy, #1)
By: J.R. Ward
Publisher: Signet
Published: Dec. 1, 2015
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Rating:

Paradise, blooded daughter of the king’s First Advisor, is ready to break free from the restrictive life of an aristocratic female. Her strategy? Join the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s training center program and learn to fight for herself, think for herself…be herself. It’s a good plan, until everything goes wrong. The schooling is unfathomably difficult, the other recruits feel more like enemies than allies, and it’s very clear that the Brother in charge, Butch O’Neal, a.k.a. the Dhestroyer, is having serious problems in his own life.

And that’s before she falls in love with a fellow classmate. Craeg, a common civilian, is nothing her father would ever want for her, but everything she could ask for in a male. As an act of violence threatens to tear apart the entire program, and the erotic pull between them grows irresistible, Paradise is tested in ways she never anticipated—and left wondering whether she’s strong enough to claim her own power…on the field, and off.

Paradise is an aristocrat female who would normally never be allowed to enter the training to be a soldier. However, she’s convinced her father that she’d never actually go to war and that she wants the training for self-defense reasons. Which, is how she ends up in a class of seven people all training for the war.

Blood Kiss is a spin-off from the Black Dagger Brotherhood. With that being said, while you don’t have to read the BDB series, you probably should. Not only does the book not solely revolve around Paradise and her love interest Craeg as they train, but it also consists of Butch and Marissa’s POV’s which were two characters that had their own story in the BDB and are predominate characters from that world. Not to mention that you get a lot of the other Brothers popping in and out and I’m sure if I had read the BDB series, I’d have been overjoyed with the whole thing. However, I did not read all of the BDB series. I read a few of the books and that was it. Mainly because I just couldn’t get into them no matter how hard I tried. While I wasn’t completely lost, I felt like someone on the outside looking in when it came to the world that Ward created. There are so many words that the author created that she had to have a full blown dictionary at the beginning of the book. I’m sure if I had been a fan of the BDB series I wouldn’t have needed to keep flipping to the dictionary provided in order to realize the strange word I was reading was really just “servant”.

I thought this book would revolve around the training that Paradise and the gang are going through but I felt like the suspenseful parts of the training were right in the beginning and the rest was just filled with angst, and Marissa and Butch’s rocky marriage. Not to mention that by the end of the book you never fully understand Craeg. I mean, he’s still a mystery to me and I still don’t understand how they fell in love in under a week. Anyways, the few parts of the training I got I loved. I think that first night that the recruits are there is by far the best part of the entire book. Hands down. I really wish there was more of that in there.

Two of the things that really bothered me with this book is all the name-brand calling and all the errors. I’m all fine and dandy if you say someone is wearing an Armani suit. While I don’t really know what the difference is with looks, I understand that that is high end and expensive. However, I don’t need to know that the pen in the characters hands is BIC or that the character is drinking some brand of something-or-other that I’ve never even heard of before. Was it soda, whiskey, vodka, gin, tequila… I have no flipping clue. Then there were the errors. Holy moly did this book have errors galore. Someone was definitely sleeping on the job when this book got passed through. That really took away from the story for me because I’d have to stop and reread the same part over and over until I figured out what was trying to be said.

I did enjoy this book. Honestly, I did. However, I had some pretty big issues with it and I wound up not fully enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I know I’m going to be in the minority on this one. :throws hands up in the air: But this just didn’t fully work for me.

“She thought about what happily-ever-afters were about, and decided that true love didn’t mean effortless, and ever-after wasn’t about cruise control. You started with the attraction, and then you opened your heart and your soul—but all that, which was no small thing, just got you to first base. There were many, many other trips to take to deeper levels of greater acceptance and understanding. That was where you found the happy. And the ever-after was the work you were always willing to put in to stay close, to learn, and to grow as people together.”