Tammy S. reviewed on 5/15/2011 + 113 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

I love the brothers. They feel like family. I love their relationships, their partners, their loyalty, courage - you name it. I love the way the WARDen writes. So why only three stars? I feel the series is slowly losing its heart. J.R. has always pushed the gritty envelope but lately it feels like it's being pushed to the point that we are losing the very thing that makes this series beloved and that's the good to counteract the harsh. From dialogue to action, everything dark was magnified, everything light was diminished.

Think for a minute back to our original couples. Wrath and Beth, Rhage and Mary, Butch and Marissa, Z and Bella, Vishous and Jane, Phury and Cormia, Rehvenge and Ehlena - what do they all have in common? The guys are hardened, gritty, world-weary warriors until they find their true mate. The women they find are inherently good: Kind, caring individuals that add the perfect counterbalance needed to the darkness in their lives. That is what works so beautifully and makes us believe in their possibilities. It is also what makes us love them. One lifts the other, giving them a reason to be better, making their life worth living, so that the world is once again a worthy place to be and fight for. We can accept all the grime from the various story lines because there is a light, a lifting influence that we know will ultimately prevail. Sigh.

In "Lover Unleashed" that thread is so thin, it is almost nonexistent. Ms. Ward spent so much time with the dark, seamy underbelly of emotion - not just in a couple of the plot lines but in every single one that the reader finds it hard to pull oneself up and out of it long enough to discover the emotions that would make us believe. Even the journey between Manny and Payne, although ending beautifully, was starved for emotional richness while flooded with the physical.

Does no one else wish for some goodness to shine through a little brighter? Does everyone else prefer drudging through the dregs for 400 pages just as long as everyone is happy in the end. Did no one else miss the humor, the touches of lightness that were sprinkled in her previous books? Please don't get me wrong, I understand it's the darkness of the brothers that define BDB but am I the only one who felt like I had feasted in the underbelly then left with too small a towel to clean up with?

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