Reviewed by Annika
TITLE: NoX
AUTHOR: Adrienne Wilder
NARRATOR: Kirt Graves
PUBLISHER: Tantor Audio
RELEASE DATE: August 27, 2019
LENGTH: 15 hours, 11 minutes
BLURB:
A nude man invades Luca Suarez’s home and protects him from creatures who cannot exist. Creatures hunting him.
The stranger can’t tell Luca why. He can’t even tell Luca his name. He remembers nothing until the moment he sees Luca. The only hint Luca has to the stranger’s identity is a tattoo on his wrist: “N o X”.
Nox doesn’t know who he is, but he’s sure of three things, his memory loss is temporary, the monsters chasing Luca are called Anubis, and his Alpha, Koda, sent Nox to protect him. There’s just one problem…. Koda is Luca’s brother who was murdered five years ago.
With each passing hour, Nox fills in the pieces painting an impossible truth. And with each passing hour, both men find themselves inexplicably attracted to each other. Something Luca is willing to embrace because he has nothing left to lose. And one Nox can’t let happen because it could get Luca killed.
REVIEW:
Holy moly what an incredible world Wilder created. It’s dark and twisted and you might just be in for the ride of your life.
Luca is dying. The time he has left can be measured in months. It’s a fate he’s accepted. When we meet him he’s quietly living his life, taking each day as it comes. But then a naked man invades his home, he’s almost attacked by a wolf and he finds himself on the run from people and creatures, Anubis, he never could have imagined from his wildest dreams. The stranger helping him doesn’t remember anything, not his name or who he is. A tattoo on his wrist spells N O X, but what it means eludes him. He does know that he is supposed to protect Luca at any price, his alpha Koda ordered him to. But Koda wasn’t just any alpha, he was also Luca’s brother – a brother that died five years earlier – kind of.
I’m not going to try to explain the plot or the world Adrienne Wilder created. That’s completely beyond me. It’s incredibly detailed and imaginative and completely unique. There are so many strands that weave together to form this story that it’s difficult to make sense of them all. The backstory alone, the science of it is amazing. It all really appealed to me, it felt fresh and new and exciting.
I have a really hard time rating this book. On the one hand the story was a really good and interesting one and the narration was engaging and on point. But there was just too much sex that it overshadowed the rest of it. The story got lost in it, and that’s never a good thing for me. There was so many times where the story just stopped for all the sex – at times it was every few minutes. To be honest, more than half of it should have been left out to make it all flow better. It literally coloured the rest of the book. Another thing that got to me was that I expected this book to be finished when it ended, to have my questions answered and have, at least the big stuff tied up. That wasn’t really the case here, it felt incomplete and unfinished.
Koda’s fate was actually the one that got to me and touched me the most. It wasn’t like any of the characters, Anubis or otherwise had a choice in what happened to them, but Koda had even less of one. The brutality of his fate was so heartbreaking. And I’m not only talking about the experiments and the test, but also from the betas. It felt like Koda wasn’t Koda, he’d become a thing for everyone, to take from and play with.
Kirt Graves nailed this story. He captured the feel of it, the essence – he captured the listener from the get go. He made you feel like you were on the run with Luca and Nox, hiding from the creatures hunting Luca. Trying to fill in the blanks in Nox’s memory, trying to find the answers. I love how he varies the intensity of his narration after the events of the book, he makes you feel the excitement, the sadness and confusion. He engages the listener and make them a part of the story, this adventure.
The book ended on a bit of a cliff-hanger (it seems to be my week for them). It’s not one that will kill you, it’s more that doors are left wide open, where the bigger story isn’t finished yet. I haven’t decided if I am going to pick up the next book or not, that is if there will be one. On the one hand, this is an interesting story, one I’ve really enjoyed. On the other, there was just too much sex for my tastes and it detracted from the rest. So I guess I’ll wait and make up my mind if another book is ever produced.
RATING: 
Narration: 4,5 hearts
Story (ignoring the amounts sex): 4,5 hearts
Enjoyment of the story: 2 stars
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