Reviewed by PizzyGirl
TITLE: Devotion
SERIES: Forbes Mates #1
AUTHOR: Grace R. Duncan
NARRATOR: Joel Leslie
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 8 hours, 48 minutes
RELEASE DATE: June 23, 2017
BLURB:
Finley Cooper is tired of waiting for his destined mate to be ready to claim him. In deference to human laws, he’s already agreed to wait until he’s 18. But now his birthday has come and gone-and his mate has a new set of excuses. Finley doesn’t understand it any more than his wolf does, and he’s beginning to wonder if fate made a mistake.
Tanner Pearce wants nothing more than to claim his mate, but he worries that Finley is too young. Tanner will never forget what happened when his best friend mated at Finley’s age, only to have that mate end up feeling trapped and breaking their bond. While rare, it can happen, and the fallout Tanner witnessed as his best friend tried to deal with the break has haunted him for years.
When Finley finally has enough, he threatens to find someone who will claim him if Tanner doesn’t, and Tanner realizes he needs to come to terms with his fears or risk losing his mate forever.
STORY REVIEW:
My first instinct is to say that this story was annoying. I mean it’s an entire book of heartbreak and unnecessary angst that could have just been resolved with a freaking conversation! That’s like my biggest pet peeve trope.
However, this author managed to get under my annoyance and make me care. I liked Fin and tanner even tho I wanted to smack them constantly. I enjoyed learning about the shifters and I really love how I learned the pack strucker and the shifter lore right alongside these young adults.
I was invested in the world and once the heads were removed from the asses and these men talked, their mating was so sweet and loving and all kinds of happiness all rolled up together.
So in the end I recommend this story if you’re looking for low external angst, a fascinatingly sweet shifter world, and a fated mating that was beautiful in its imagery.
NARRATION REVIEW:
I will be quite honest, everything I have listened to by Joel Leslie has been stories with characters requiring foreign to me accents and he usually sounds very similar. However, this story was rather American and in my opinion, Joel Leslie showed a wider range of voice types that I have encountered from him before. There were still some voices that felt too aristocratic for the story but overall it was great.
RATING: 
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