Blood Kiss (Black Dagger Legacy, #1)

by J. R. Ward

Paradise, blooded daughter of the king's First Advisor, is ready to break free from the restrictive life of an aristocratic female. Her strategy? Join the Black Dagger Brotherhood's training center program and learn to fight for herself, think for herself...be herself. It's a good plan, until everything goes wrong. The schooling is unfathomably difficult, the other recruits feel more like enemies than allies, and it's very clear that the Brother in charge, Butch O'Neal, a.k.a. the Dhestroyer, is having serious problems in his own life.

And that's before she falls in love with a fellow classmate. Craeg, a common civilian, is nothing her father would ever want for her, but everything she could ask for in a male. As an act of violence threatens to tear apart the entire program, and the erotic pull between them grows irresistible, Paradise is tested in ways she never anticipated--and left wondering whether she's strong enough to claim her own power...on the field, and off.

• ISBN10: 0349409250
• ISBN13: 9780349409252
• Publish Date: 1 December 2015
• Publish Status: Withdrawn
• Out of Print: 29 March 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
• Imprint: Piatkus Books
• Format: Paperback (UK Trade)
• Pages: 432
• Language: English

Reviews

[Rowena]

This book start off a bit slow for me but I'm glad that I stuck with it because the action picks up, and the characters really shine. I really enjoyed both Craeg and Paradise and really liked seeing their romance blossom. I knew right off the bat who the bad guy was but still enjoyed the story being told and the set up for the rest of the series. Good stuff.

[EBookObsessed]

I was torn between giving this a 3 or a 4. There is nothing wrong with the story, but we finally were getting new trainees into the BDB and unfortunately, this story was more focused on the Romeo and Juliet romance of Paradise and Craeg. It was one of the few times that the romance pissed me off.

The Brotherhood has literally opened the door to anyone who wants to train to become a Brother and the applications are flooding in, including one from Paradise, the only daughter of the First Advisor to Wrath. Paradise wants to be more than the pretty piece of fluff that the glymera would force her to be.

Most of the 60 applicants who arrive at the training center aren’t ready for the Brother’s trial by fire and most won’t be invited back for the actual training. In fact, less than 10 of the original 60 will actually continuing in their training, but Paradise made it past the Brother’s initial test. But just because you made it in, doesn’t mean you have what it takes to go all the way. Paradise is in but she doesn’t want anyone to know that she is a member of the glymera or more particularly, who her father really is. She doesn’t want to be treated differently by the other recruits.

Especially since Paradise is finding it hard to concentrate whenever fellow recruit Craeg is in the same room, and the same could be said for him. But Craeg doesn’t want the distraction of the beautiful Paradise. Craeg has plans of his own after he finishes his training that do not have anything to do with settling down and starting a family. Craeg wants a little payback for the loss of his family during the raids. He lost his family due to the action of the rich glymera family that protected themselves and left everyone else in the house to the Lessers.

While things heat up between Craeg and Paradise, things seems to be cooling between Butch and his Marissa. They seem to be drifting apart. Marissa is consumed by her work at Safe Place and is especially distracted after a woman comes in nearly unrecognizable after a severe beating. It was so severe, Marissa needed to call her brother, Havers, in a desperate attempt to save the woman. When all attempts her save her fail, Marissa is tortured by the fact that she was never able to obtain the woman’s identity. While the Brothers keep the race safe from Lessers, the vampires don’t seem to have any type of justice system in place for investigating crimes such as was perpetrated on this woman and to find out who she was. Marissa will turn to her hellren, former Cadwell Police Detective Butch O’Neal to help.

Butch will do anything for his Marissa, except let her come with him into the shady underworld that might just be where this mystery woman spent her last night.

THOUGHTS:
Sometimes rating these books is hard to determine. There was nothing wrong with the story and it will be enjoyable to Black Dagger Brotherhood fans, but I was completely disappointed with the whole issues of the new recruits. First, why did it take so long for the Brothers to finally determine that they were outnumbered and that they better have more Brothers and since the Primale was no longer knocking up Chosen for more Brothers, you had to start training other strong members of the vampire society? I knew they had a problem from the first book.

Second, I understand that storywise J.R. Ward cannot tell the story of 60 individual recruits, but even the army doesn’t toss out willing recruits until they tortured them and trained them for several weeks to determine who can make it and who won’t. In this story, it is a B.S. attack by the Brothers on the unsuspecting crowd of untrained individuals that has them eliminating most of them quickly. The biggest B.S. and the only spoiler I will give you is that the doggen welcome the new recruits with food and drink while they wait for the Brothers to arrive which results in quick and painful food poisoning. Many of those unsuspecting recruits fall to the floor in cramped pain and can’t make it through the Brother’s test. While you don’t want to bother training someone who will only panic during a fight with the Lesser, you should give them some training and more than a case of food poisoning to see if they are worthy. Yes, the Brothers often fight while wounded. Yeah, yeah. I just think that training new recruits should fall somewhere between the Bloodleter’s training camp and the Brother’s I-don’t-feel-like-wasting-time-training-you-loser’s camp.

Then once we finally have narrowed down our 60 candidates to less than 10, you would think we would get into some interesting training and see what it takes to make a Brother outside of what we know from V’s recollection of the Bloodleter’s camp. Nope. Not really. We hear that they learn bomb making, and they do muscle torturing exercises in the gym, but we spend a good deal of time with Paradise and Craeg eye-fucking each other over the gym equipment, and Craeg getting into fights over Paradise. And my least favorite part has to be Craeg’s Officer and a Gentleman impression when he tells Paradise he doesn’t have time for her, he has to focus on his training because he has no place else to go.

This was one of those few books where the romance and the sex were annoying me since it was taking away from any opportunity we might have to learn about the recruits. Okay, the second spoiler I am going to give you is that after weeks of Craeg’s “I can’t touch you” because he starts to realize that Paradise is a virgin and he’s not good enough, even though Paradise tries to get Craeg to sleep with her, he finally relents and ends up taking her virginity in a nightclub bathroom. Oh, he is a romantic that Craeg. Something to tell the grandkids.

The issue between Butch and Marissa was more Marissa’s realization that Butch has her on a pedestal and has a true belief that a woman is a saint or a whore but she can’t be a mix. The clues start to indicate that the woman was at a sex club just before she came to Safe Place and Marissa insists on coming along (even though they really had no plan) but Butch won’t bring her to a seedy sex club because Marissa is too clean for that. I was quite offended when Butch finally relents and they both dress up in head to toe in creepy spandex-type outfits with gruesome masks and they are both drooling over each other. I like the stories where they dress up in gowns and suits for the sex club trip rather then the freaky outfits. Yuck.

There was too much drooling and not enough fighting in this BDB novel for my taste.

If there are any issues with names in my review, it is once again because I audiobook the BDB series rather than read it. In fact, next month we will discuss my first BDB read where I spent three minutes looking at the word “Xcor” trying to figure that out until I saw a reference to his deformed face. Since the narrator pronounces his name like “Score,” Xcor didn’t register with me at first.

[Cocktails and Books]

This review was originally posted on Cocktails and Books

I have been looking forward to this spin-off series. As much as I loved the Black Dagger Brotherhood series, this spin-off felt like we were getting back to the basics. Focusing on moving what the BDB stood for forward and that meant re-opening the training center and finding the best of the best...no matter who they were.

BLOOD KISS focuses on two couples: Butch/Marissa and Craeg/Paradise. It was amazing the similarities between these couples. Marissa and Paradise the belles of the glymera who fall for men who feel they are so far beneath them. They each have a male family figure who tries to uphold the beliefs of the glymera. But there is one big difference between Marissa and Paradise. Paradise bucks the glymera system at a much younger age. She felt trapped, just like Marissa. She didn't want to disappoint her father, just as Marissa did with Havers. But she also realized she would never be happy in that world. She joined the program with the Brotherhood to have a purpose. To fight the war and help her people. She bucked the system and discovered she was a much stronger person than everyone (including herself) gave her credit for. Marissa did all of this, but not until she was almost broken by Wrath, Havers and the expectations of society.

Craeg was a male who had a chip on his shoulder (not much different than a certain Red Sox fan). His family lost during the Lessening society attacks, he entered the program set on exacting revenge on those that took his family away. He doesn't feel he's worthy of much, considering who his parents were or how they were treated by the glymera, and that is very apparent for many of his interactions with Paradise. He fights against his feelings and his baser vampire instincts when it comes to Paradise, treating her cruelly at times (even when he was verbally kicking himself). We're left to wonder, practically to the end of the book, if Craeg was ever going to get out of his own way when it came to Paradise. He eventually does, but it takes him having to take a good look at himself and figuring out he was worthy.

BLOOD KISS was an excellent start to this spin-off series. I can't wait to see what happens with the remaining trainees, what brothers will share the stage with them and how they all will fit into the overall fight with the Lessening Society.