Hello, bookworms! Long time, no see. As usual, life is crazy. Luckily, Thursday approaches… and I’ll be bringing you not one, but two book reviews! Also, I have some excerpt and cover reveals sitting in my e-mail I still need to get to, so my fingers are crossed to be more active in the next few days.

I digress. My bedtime is approaching, so let’s get to review one, Lover Awakened. This is the third installment in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series by J.R. Ward. This is the book all my reading friends warned me I would fall head-over-heels for, so let me just get to what I thought.

I enjoyed Z’s story. Don’t kill me, friends, but I didn’t love him the way I adored Wrath and Rhage’s adventures. His story was dark and morbid, which I can thoroughly appreciate, but I felt a bit disconnected from him until the end when it was almost a bit too late. That might have been the point, though, and if so, then well done, Ward.

Zsadist is another member of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, and a former bloodslave to an elite vampire group called the glymera. The things that happened to him in his past are unthinkable, and my heart ached for him at the pain he had to carry around for the rest of his days. Thankfully, this is where Bella comes into play. She met Z previously, and things didn’t go well for them, but something about her got under his skin. So when she’s taken by a group of lessers, he feels this obligation to defend and avenge her honor.

He’s no knight in shining armor. Once the two are in close quarters again, things are on edge, and they don’t always see eye-to-eye. Their communication absolutely sucks, and things don’t always work out the way either of them want.

What I did adore (of course), is the end. It didn’t fully go the way I expected it to, and while some of it was heart-wrenching, most of it was better than I wanted. I hope to hear more from these characters in future books so I can grow to love them even more (I’m sure I will).

My Final Rating: three out of five stars