Review: Lover Revealed

This is the fourth book in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series, and it was the one I was looking forward to the least, which is probably why I was able to put off reading it until my exams were over. Though I liked Butch, the human who was within the Brotherhood circle but not a part of it, he was hardly as bad or as sexy as the vampires. Marissa, his love interest, was portrayed as very weak and dull in Dark Lover, and I had a hard time shaking that first impression to see her as a good heroine in Lover Revealed. However, in the end this book won me over just as much as the others, mostly because of the homoerotic tension between two of the main male characters. The eroticism in these novels is really fantastic.

The next novel features Vishous as the main male character, and it won't be out until October, which is maddening. One thing that Ward seems to do so well is suck you into the lives of the peripheral characters in every novel, so that even as you are reading and enjoying the current novel, you're anticipating the next one. As I read Dark Lover, I wanted to read the novel featuring Zsadist as a main character; while I was reading Lover Revealed, I anticipated the novels that would feature Vishous and Rhevenge as main characters. I'm even warming up to the horrible names.

The one criticism I have of Ward (besides the names) is that she flirts around the edges of convention but ultimately keeps things at status quo. The Black Dagger Brotherhood is a bunch of hulking vampires that talk like rappers, listen to hip hop, and just generally appropriate a lot of African American cultural stereotypes -- and yet every character in the novels so far is white. There is homoerotic tension between some main male characters (especially in Lover Revealed), but so far, no characters are actually homosexual or even overtly bisexual. Ward goes only so far, but in the end her characters remain the classic romantic male stereotype -- white, virile, heterosexual beefcakes.

There are probably very good reasons for this -- it is likely that Ward feels pressure both from her audience and her publisher to keep things conventional. After all, for all my open-minded talk, I've never attempted to find and read a romance novel featuring characters of non-white ethnicities, though I am aware of the small (but apparently growing) subgenre of romance novels marketed towards African Americans and other ethnic groups. Even as I avoid these books (though avoid may be too strong a word -- they're hard to find, and therefore very easy to avoid) I find the system almost offensively segregated. African Americans and other ethnic groups have not been represented in romance novels, so instead of incorporating more people of other ethnicities into romance novels, there was a subgenre of "African American" novels created. White people can still have their "white" novels, and African Americans can have their own novels. Fortunately, as least as far as I know, these novels have not been given separate groupings in the romance section of bookstores. Yet.