I have long been a fan of Paranormal Romance and Jr Ward has been one of my authors.  All the readers out there know what I am talking about.  We each have a few authors whom we adopt.  We preorder their books months in advance and wait anxiously for release day.  We are at Barnes and Noble when the doors open or we order from Amazon to make sure we get the book on release day.  Sometimes we buy more than one copy to make sure we have the book no matter what happens.  JR Ward was one of my authors.  But something happened with the Black Dagger Brotherhood right around book 8 and they changed.  I wanted to love the books as they came out and with some of them I was successful, with others not so much.  The characters were there but the trials they faced were just so awful.  Some of it felt contrived.  And some of the stories had so many storylines trying to interact, it was easy to get lost in the shuffle.  In hindsight, I see that the books had to change and given the strong emotional investment we had in all the characters the jumping around was necessary.  Then things got worse.  The Happily Ever After endings stopped coming.  Some of the characters died and it was worse than the first time around.  It felt like the world in the books was every bit as bad as the real world.  Tragedy dogged the steps of our favorite characters and rather than resolution we got abdication. 

A lot of fans left.  And they were vocal about their defections.  And a lot of the fans that remained were more cautious.  Yes, we wanted to read it.  We wanted to see how our characters were doing.  But the excitement was tempered with trepidation.  What big bad thing was going to happen now?  So, I was ambivalent when I got my copy of the Chosen.  I have to say that after reading it I am cautiously optimistic for the series.  And JR Ward is back to being one of my authors.  I’m a little frightened for the next book because I think its going to be about one of my favorite couples and I don’t want anything bad to happen to them.  

I could write a long review of the Chosen, but since I am releasing this review on release day I will hold my tongue.  I will say this, though.  The Chosen has restored my faith in the BDB.  So, I will wait with bated breath for our next book and I recommend that the readers who defected recently over a certain death might be surprised by what happens in this book.