My Long Review of Lover Reborn by JR Ward

The review I posted earlier was the one I did just after the book came out. I promised I would wait to write a longer review until the book had been out awhile to give everyone a chance to discover it on their own without a reviewer bias. Here's the longer review. I've not changed my mind...I LOVE this book.

JR Ward has surpassed herself with Lover Reborn. Tohrment is still mourning his beloved wife, his shellan, Wellsie and their unborn child. He has been living at the mansion with the other brothers but he is a thin, broken shadow of the vampire he was, he has not come back to the leader he was and has not moved forward from what happened. He is stuck, being in the world of the living but living as one of the dead. His only real living is in death, in going after and killing the Lessers, the enemies of their people, those who killed his beloved. That is the only thing he does with any life, any feeling. And that feeling is revenge, vengeance, as if killing enough of them would bring his beloved back to him. 

And he fears sleep. He is seeing her in his dreams but she is not happily in the Fade with their son, she is trapped in a cold world between life and afterlife, calling out to him to save her, breaking his heart again and again. He does not know what it is or what to do. He goes to Lassiter, the fallen angel who found him and brought him back, who tells him that he must give Wellsie up, learn to love again so that she is released to go on to the Fade where she belongs.

And that is the one thing that Tohr has sworn he can never do. He has sworn to mourn her forever. And by that oath, he has doomed her, their son, and possibly them all.

Unknown to Tohr, there is one female housed in the mansion with the strength, the knowledge, and the love to be able to free all of them, someone who has been seen but really unseen all this time by her own history and pain. When they come together, unexpectedly, they clash and fight the inevitable as they both seek to find their way through their pain.

All the while, there is a new group of soldiers, lead by Xcor, seek to get rid of the king, Wrath, and the Brotherhood and take over. John-Matthew and Xhex are trying to make their mating work, and living apart trying to figure out how to fight together and still live together. The rest of the cast of characters weave in and out of what is probably the best of the Black Dagger Brotherhood books to date. 

There are the usual Lessers to be hunted, Glymera to be pacified, new characters come to challenge the status quo in Caldwell NY in over the one year of this 600 pages of pure action and emotion. The book had been looked forward to by the multitudes of Black Dagger fans world wide for a whole year and JR Ward did not disappoint. 

I found myself laughing, screaming at the characters; ok, screaming at Tohr more than once; having to put the book down and walk away to think, sit up until all hours of the night reading, and, in the end, I probably went through a box of tissues and scared the beejees out of my dog as I cried and howled in pain in sympathy. I don’t remember ever crying as hard as I did in Lover Reborn.

It's a 5-star roller-coaster of a ride but one that will have you wanting to re-read it almost immediately. And we already have a promise that the next one, a whole year from now, is the story of Qhuinn and Blaylock! I can hardly wait! I adore the Black Dagger Brotherhood.

Charlayne Elizabeth Denney, Tigris Reviewer