Tome Thursday: The Shadows

Hello everyone!

So, okay, I only just realized that I should probably include a SPOILER ALERT somewhere in the description of this blog, or at the beginning of each entry, but since this is kind of a review and recap place for me to express myself and talk about what I've seen or read, I figure that, generally speaking, that should be a given. It's not always the case though so I apologize if anyone has been 'spoiled' by certain facts I state in these posts, especially on just-released movies or books, but there you go, we all learn and are works in progress along the way, right?

Right.

Back to the actual blog post - yes, with spoilers ahead - I'm going to talk about The Shadows today. A little while ago I posted an entry about Lover Avenged, which was book seven in the Black Dagger Brotherhood book series. Well, end of March saw the release of the very latest installment (number thirteen!) and I think I pretty much dropped three other books I'm reading at the moment (yes, I always read multiple books) just so I could get my hands on this one.

Basically, to recap the story so far from the series as a whole: the BDB are still fighting Lessers, the deity characters have sort of slithered to the sideleiness, most of them are already mated/married, the King now has a son (L.W.!), and we go into a stretch where not too many characters actually exist to have separate books written about them in a new sort of way. This time, it was Trez and iAm, brothers, members of a subspecies called 'Shadows' because they can literally ghost around as a mist or shadow and no one's the wiser, and they have a very neat array of tricks up their sleeve for fighting their enemies.

Now, we met the brothers back when we first met Rehvenge, as they were his bouncers/bodyguards/brother figures, and we sort of had glimpses of them through the rest of the series, most notably when Trez ran into one of the Chosen, Selena - because he bonded with her.

Unfortunately, since he's also pretty much disgusting in his own eyes and the eyes of his culture (because he's slept with a HUGE number of women over the years), he keeps away. That is, until things come to a head in this current book, and we delve deeper into the disease Selena has, which is a latent gene that came out from the inbreeding thing the vampires had going on to produce the best of the best (there's ALWAYS something that goes wrong). Basically, it's called the 'Arrest', and it makes joints into concrete-type material, freezing the vampire it affects in place, and causing them to die. Newsflash: yeah, Selena has it. Newsflash two: no one can do anything about it. So the main theme in this book is the relationship between a Shadow who has been destined from birth to marry the princess in his tribe, but who bonded with a vampire who was basically born to die.

This book was actually fairly confusingf to me at first because of the amount of parallel storylines it had running; there's at least a handful of them to go with the main one, shadowing or mirroring it in some way, and most of the characters we've already met in the previous books come out to play again, which means you really need to remember details from before if you want to make sense of this.

As stated, the main theme is the love story; then we have the second theme, which is basically the s'Hisbe, or the Shadow tribe, and how the brothers connect to it. At birth (they're twins), it was predicted based on the stars that Trez would marry the next ruler of the tribe. Trez and iAm bolted from the territory though, and the chief executioner, s'Ex, was sent after them as the princess came of-age. We get to meet a servant girl, maichen, who sneaks around and ends up meeting iAm while the guy is held captive because he was looking for a medical solution for Selena. The electric current over his body when she enters the room? Yeah, he's bonded with her. They begin a covet love affair (noted here should be the fact that up until this point, iAm was a virgin) which is showing disastrous endings when the reader realises that maichen is actually - wait for it - the princess.

Cue pin drop.

Add to this the fact that there's no way to save Selena, and it's one hell of a complication, especially when the princess realizes her mother forged the documents that bind her to Trez - in actuality, she was supposed to mate iAm, but he was born sickly and wasn't supposed to live. I mean, happily ever after DOES exist! Especially since s'Ex deposits the queen's head at the feet of the princess, and, after she sets iAm free from his bond, he comes to her of his own free will. Boo-yah.

So that's two; we then get introduced to more people. Wrath's First Adviser, Abalone, has a daughter - but in this book she gets a name, Paradise, and she'll be featured in the first book of a new series called Black Dagger Legacy. How awesome is that? We are also privy to a short snapshot of Craeg, an intriguing vampire who applies for the Brotherhood's training program. He will also feature in the new series.

And then, of course, there's Xcor and his Bastards, who break away from Throe - or more aptly, Throe breaks away from them, since Xcor has given another Chosen, Layla, his word not to depose Wrath or kill him (this is the Romeo and Juliet story of the series), but Throe disagrees, and strikes out on his own. I think we're going to be seeing a hell of a lot more of him, and I sincerely hope Xcor remembers to warn Layla at some point. Oh, also, Layla is pregnant with twins - but Xcor isn't the dad even though he's essentially bonded with her. Yeah, it's complicated.

The last, short storyline is of Assail (one of my favourite vampires to date) and his cousins, and his drug dealing business with the Lessers. Wrath finds out of course, and then Assail goes all vampire on the Forelesser, delivering his head - and the location of the race's biggest enemy - to the Blind King. Show time!

Whew, that's a whole lot of things to cover! And through it all, there's this overwhelming sense of family you get from everywhere: the Shadow brothers, what they would do for each other, Wrath refusing to hand Trez over to the s'Hisbe even under threat of war between the two species, what Layla's doing for her family and her kin, the memories Trez's situation brings up. Here, I have to confess I was confused as to why Rhage was given a lot of the book's POV. But then I remembered that, in his book (the second one), he was also on the verge of losing his mate, only she was saved. So he has some serious PTSD going for him in this one. So does Tohr, who lost his first mate to a Lesser attack. It's all about family and connections, and I cried through about half of this book. No shame in admitting it. None at all.

There's always the trademark humour, although it might feel scattered to readers with so many things going on; I had to sit down right after finishing it to hammer out all te different plot lines! Plus it's sad, along with happy, and sad books are always the hardest. I wouldn't recommend reading this if you haven't read any of the previous ones, because, even though the rest could generally be readable as stand-alones, this one is much too complicated. There are too many characters running around and plot lines are mentioned that, if you haven't been following the series, you won't understand.

Other than that?

I think I'm going to do a whole lot of breathing before I read it again. Like, seriously.

xx

*image not mine