REVIEWED BY CINDY
TITLE: In Your Eyes
SERIES: Mates Collection Book Three
NARRATED BY: Charlie David
AUTHOR: Cardeno C.
PUBLISHER: The Romance Authors
LENGTH: 5 Hours 59 Minutes (200 Pages)
Blurb:
Two very different men with a tumultuous history must overcome challenges from all sides and see past their society’s rules to realize they are destined for one another.
Raised to become Alpha of the Yafenack pack, Samuel Goodwin dedicates his life to studying shifter laws, strengthening his body, and learning from his father. But despite his best efforts, Samuel can’t relate to people, including those he’s supposed to lead.
When Samuel meets Korban Keller, the son of a neighboring pack’s Alpha, he reacts with emotion instead of intellect for the first time in his life. Resenting the other shifter for throwing him off-balance, Samuel first tries to intimidate Korban and then desperately avoids him. What he can’t do is forget Korban’s warm eyes, easy smile, and happy personality.
When a battle between their fathers ends tragically, Samuel struggles to lead his pack while Korban works to break through Samuel’s emotional barriers. Two very different men with a tumultuous history must overcome challenges from all sides and see past their society’s rules to realize they are destined for one another.
Review:
Of course I jumped at the chance to review this audio version of a story I have read in the past. Once again I wanted to see if it would bring out the same emotions in me having the story read by someone else. And it did…but not completely how I expected.
First of all, I think it’s only fair to mention that I probably won’t make a habit of listening to audiobooks. They go too slow for me because I’m not exaggerating when I say that when I read, I devour a book. People often comment to me on how quickly I get through a book, especially one that has taken hold of my imagination and dragged me along. More than once I’ve had to prove that yes, I am still getting all the little details, as fast as I’m going.
When I first read this story, I had a hard time at the beginning with Samuel’s attitude. I didn’t quite understand where all the suspicion that seemed rooted in him right from the time he was a little boy came from. Having it read out loud only exacerbated that confusion for me. He didn’t get it from his parents, who seemed to be open people who never pressured Samuel into being something he wasn’t.
I get that Samuel always felt different and he didn’t understand where it came from so he always felt like he had to work twice as hard as anyone else to be what he felt was expected from him.
But once I got past the beginning and to the meat of the story, I quickly moved past my early qualms and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
Samuel is the son of an alpha who knows from the beginning of his life what he’s destined to do. The pressure he puts on himself to get everything right colors everything he does and his perception of everyone he meets. And when he meets Korban, it just throws his world into further chaos.
Korban is also the son of an alpha, but his father is not the Alpha he should be and he knows it. But Korban manages to grow into being a good man who just wants to do what’s right for his pack. He knows from the first time he meets Samuel that the other wolf is going to be someone important in his life.
Both of these characters are easy to love. My heart broke for Samuel over and over as his life gets turned upside down and he struggles to do the right thing for everyone he cares about. It takes him a while to accept that Korban is a positive addition to his life, but once he does, he goes about keeping him there with the same single-minded determination he does everything else.
I cheered these two men on, loving Korban’s strength of conviction as he shows Samuel how to connect to himself and his pack and once they are working together, they are a force to be reckoned with.
Charlie David is the perfect narrator for these stories. His smooth voice and subtle intonations bring a sense of continuation to the collection, letting the listener get lost in the story every time. I loved how he finds little things to help distinguish the characters from one another and I think the collaboration between the author and this narrator is gold.
Rating: 
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