Book Review: The Angels' Share (Book #2 in the Bourbon Kings series) by J.R. Ward

Right off the bat, I have to say that despite the fact that I think The Angels' Share has a lot of the same problems that The Bourbon Kings had, I actually liked The Angels' Share even more than I ultimately liked The Bourbon Kings. If I’m being completely honest, I’m not sure exactly why that is. In many ways, this book didn’t really introduce any new storylines; it pretty much just continued the storylines that were featured in The Bourbon Kings. The main storyline that J.R. Ward continued to focus on in this book was the aftermath of William Baldwine’s death, and the family having to deal with all of the debt that they’re in. While my thoughts on Ward not really introducing more subplots into the series as it continues with future books may change, I honestly really liked that Ward pretty much just continued the storylines from the first book. I think that really helped add to the soap opera quality that this series has, which is what drew me to The Bourbon Kings, and made me want to read it when I discovered that book. Plus, it makes a lot of sense to me that Ward didn’t just completely move on from the subplots and the various conflicts that were featured heavily in The Bourbon Kings, since it was established early on in this book that it had only been about a week since Lane had returned to his family’s estate in order to check on the family’s cook, Miss Aurora Toms, who had had a health scare at the beginning of The Bourbon Kings.

One of the things that I definitely loved the most about The Angels' Share is that I felt like J.R. Ward did a much better job of writing this book in such a way that it felt like much more of an ensemble story compared to The Bourbon Kings. The Bourbon Kings really focused primarily Lane, and Lizzie to a certain extent, since she’s the woman he loves and wants to be with, and while they are two of my favorite characters from the series, as I was reading The Bourbon Kings the first time that I read it; I just found myself wishing that Ward had been better about giving all of the other characters more “screen time” in that book. When it comes to The Angels' Share, Ward really seemed to do more with the character Sutton Smythe by having chapters where Sutton was interacting with people outside of the Bradford family, such as her father and various people that she does business with. I really liked seeing Sutton get some more character development beyond her relationship with the Bradford family in this book, but it did feel rather random to me that out of all the characters in the series that Ward could have focused on some more in this book, she chose to focus on Sutton a little bit more. That being said, I’m not complaining about Sutton getting a little bit more character development in this book. It just seemed rather odd to me that Sutton was one of the characters that Ward chose to develop a little bit further in this book.

The Bourbon Kings: Oh, my! This book sure is one giant soap opera (My thoughts on book #1 in the Bourbon Kings book series by J.R. Ward)

Let me start out by saying that originally I was planning to wait a while to read and review The Bourbon Kings. However, I decided to go ahead and read it now because I’ve wanted to read it for months, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how excited I was to read The Bourbon Kings. Right off the bat, I have to say that I absolutely loved this book. That being said, I’m just going to come right out and say that while I loved this book, there’s no denying that it also has a lot of problems, which I’ll get to later.

The main thing that I love about this book is the fact that it’s basically a soap opera in the form of a book. I’m a huge fan of soap operas, and I typically love just about anything that has a soap opera vibe to it. As soon as I read the plot description of the book that’s on jacket of book the first time that I saw The Bourbon Kings at Barnes & Noble, I immediately thought that the book sounded a lot like a soap opera, and most of the reviews for the book on Amazon also compared the book to Dallas and Dynasty. Reading so many reviews that compared the book to soap operas was definitely the thing that drew me to The Bourbon Kings the most. One thing that really helps this book to feel like a soap opera is fact that the story has a big ensemble of characters and a variety of storylines that the characters are involved in. While The Bourbon Kings is definitely an ensemble piece, at the end of the day, it’s very much Lane’s story. He’s definitely the character that gets the most focus and development throughout the book. I should probably also mention that technically Lane’s name is Tulane. Yeah, I would definitely go by the name Lane, too. Tulane sounds like an extremely ridiculous name that would most likely cause the bullies at school to tease anybody with that name every day of their life and maybe even beat them up, too.

The Bourbon Kings’ ensemble nature is one of the things that really helped the book to feel like a soap opera. However, it also definitely leads to one of this book’s biggest problems, which is that it was often times kind of challenging to keep track of all the characters and subplots in book. You almost need to make a very complicated chart to keep track of all the one trillion characters in this book, the numerous subplots and which characters are involved in each of the subplots. While the book doesn’t actually have a trillion characters in it, this book does have a lot of characters to keep track of, and unfortunately too many of the characters were woefully neglected and left underdeveloped, if you ask me.