Where to begin.
I wanted to enjoy this book. I really did. I like John Mathew from the previous books, and though Xhex isn't my favorite of the females, I did find her intriguing enough to want to learn her story.
Lover Mine isn't a novel as much as it is an exercise in connecting slang, meandering subplots, and preludes to forthcoming volumes in the series into something semi-cogent. It felt disjointed, unevenly paced, and contrived. Why?
-Xhex appears to have undergone a personality transplant; abduction or not, she's re-imagined in a way that doesn't seem credible to her previous appearances.
-The Mhurder (sp?) subplot fell flat in its attempt to create compelling reasons for wanting to learn more about him. Silly, uninteresting, and bizarre (A compassionate, abolitionist "ghost" who has sex with his B&B guests to actually bring couples closer together, and skulks around his mansion a la Boo Radley? Okeydokey...)
-John Matthew goes through some of the worst turmoil anyone can probably experience regarding a lover...and his sister doesn't once reach out to him that we can see. Where was Beth?
-Tohr's parents arranged his marriage to Wellsie, with whom he fell instantly in love, but now we learn his dad was a jackhole. Hmm. Guess it's possible but, again, feels like Ward conveniently, and clumsily, disrupts a plot point to triage the story. Didn't feel natural.
-Now, I may need another reader to chime in here and correct/confirm this for me. When John tells Xhex about his rape and she asks who else knows, I don't believe he mentions Wrath in the list he recites. This could be forgiven except that John's telling Wrath about it is the whole reason Qhuinn got off for slicing Slash's throat. That's kind of a big part of the story, isn't it? The detail itself doesn't bother me as much as what it likely (if I'm right) indicates does: Ward's attention to detail is getting sloppy, and has been for a few books now.
-Every other word doesn't automatically become slang because you cut off or diminuitize the last two syllables ("sitch?" "stillies?"). I know she has a personal love of rap and slang that I can certainly appreciate, but loving hip-hop and being just straight-up inarticulate don't need to go hand-in-hand (especially not when I'm paying nearly $30 for your book).
That leads to my other problem with LM and, in general this series.
Ward cribs heavily from hip-hop and, to some extent, African-American culture, yet does a pitiable job of including *any* people of color prominently in her books (And no, the Shadows don't count as they have only been portrayed only on the fringes of the BDB world. They've been around much longer than Saxton and hell, even Saxton got his own plot before they have). This really bothers me. The slang, music, and mannerisms are so borrowed from rap culture that I'm surprised Ward doesn't include Jay-Z, 50 Cent, T.I., et al, in her acknowledgments. It's one thing to be inspired by a culture and weave elements of it into your work, and another thing to blatantly mimic its mores and not have some representation of the people it comes from, or of any other kinds of people for that matter. In the beginning it enhanced the story but now I feel like it's become Ward's way to announce how down she's with it, yo, and implement a ready-made, street cred-worthy version of masculinity that, frankly, cuts down on her work of having to make you believe how "hard" the Brothers are (Because every guy who likes rap is automatically tough, isn't he?).
According to Ward (and I'm paraphrasing here--read her message boards for the exact quote), the Brothers don't view race or sexual preference in the same way as humans, meaning that they don't possess the same prejudices or predispositions to hateful behavior re: those two categories. It seems incongruous, then, that there are no people of different ethnic backgrounds that feature heavily in these stories. Ward has said she "downloads" the stories mentally as they come to her from the Brothers themselves, and is only reporting what she's told. Riiight. That's not at all a convenient way to avoid having to answer (and possibly face) some serious issues at the heart of your characterizations and fictional world structure/view.
I don't know if I'll return to the BDB after this. I like Tohr a lot, and would very much like to read his story. But it feels like the bigger the author gets, the lower in quality the books become. It's inevitable, I guess. The Stephanie Plum series has taken a similar turn for the worse, and so have a few others in that vein (I'm hanging onto Diana Gabaldon by a thread).
My gripes aside, I think that Ward is generally a talented writer, and incredibly imaginative to have come up with a world that, even if I have problems with it, makes me write a diatribe about it on Amazon. Maybe after reading some of the feedback, she'll take it into consideration. I wouldn't mind seeing her get back into finer form and expand the purview of her world to more aptly reflect the tenets she says it exists by.
