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I'm sucked into a series on the recommendation of a friend.
It's another bodice-ripping, fang-tastic vampire romance series, The Black Dagger Brotherhood series by J.R. Ward.
It's entertaining (in a trash-television way), and getting less erotic/romance and more action-y as the series progresses (I'm on book 6 of 7 now), but I do have some serious gripes.
1. The names. Holy sheepdip. No pansy names for these vampires, no sir. Wrath. Rhevenge. Zsadist. Phury. Vishous. Tohrment. Need I go on? I cringed in the initial getting-to-know-you character setup, because HOLY SHIT, HOW SILLY IS THIS? ...and then I remembered: Vampire romance novels. Right.
2. Nobody, AND I MEAN NOBODY, talks in the hyper-macho style that these guys do. It's giggle-inducing.
3. The author seems to throw in a whole lot of unnecessary "H"-es in the midst of words to make them vampiresque according to her universe. For instance, the vamps don't "AVENGE" their brothers, they "AHVENGE" them. Females are put into SEHCLUSION by their GHARDIANS. Every time that mother-effing H shows up in a new word, I GROAN. Literally.
4. For some bizarre reason, the author loves acronyms. LOVES THEM! I mean, to the point where I'm annoyed. BMOC was the first of many, many pointless ones.
5. Flashbacks to the 1800s includes a lot of cheap dialogue that uses the word "verily" a bit too much. I also groan every time I see this word.
6. Speaking of dialogue, maybe I'm un-hip or something, but the two most overused phrases of the books, period, are "like you read about" and "true?" (which is something like saying "right?" at the end of a sentence, and something I've never heard anyone say in real life, ever).
Examples:
-He was gonna put a hurt on that undead fucker like you read about.
-They were going to go back to the bedroom and get reacquainted like you read about.
-He missed her like you read about.
-He was downing the Grey Goose like you read about.
AD NAUSEUM. The phrase is just awkward. Nobody speaks like this. I suppose this is all really a subset of bitching over #2.
7. Generic romance bitching: Why is it after a couple of hundred years or more of being single/tortured/broken, all of these guys find romantic partners within the space of a year, completely coincidentally? I mean, really.
All of that said, although I can't really recommend the books very highly for the above reasons, I'm still curious as to what happens overall. It's like being captivated by a highway accident; I can't stop reading.
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2 (11.8%)
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