The first thing anyone should know before listening is that you have to be comfortable with Christianity if you want to enjoy it. All the Hunter lore is very heavily entrenched in it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, I’m just personally not a fan. Though it is straight up weird for a guy to cry tears of joy after finding out his boyfriend has a tattoo infused with the blood of Christ. I’m pretty sure this was during pillow talk too, weird timing, weird reaction, just so weird.
Anyway, that wouldn’t warrant a two star rating. What does are the following things:
-D’Angelo is a massive jerk to Angel at first. He does a 180 later, but he’s super arrogant at the beginning. Like horribly so. He almost dies, but it’s so extreme that I think his arrogance would’ve realistically gotten him killed ages before the book could begin. And he’s so rude about it that it’s hard to want him and Angel together. Also, it’s really concerning that he can be so mean to Angel and think dirty thoughts about him at the same time. Big ick. Yes it gets better, but it’s just not fun to watch.
-Every character is extremely one dimensional, particularly the women. Everyone can be described with just a couple words, which isn’t really a good thing. Angel: emotionally wounded innocent virgin (which is such an author red flag) who also happens to see the future, D’Angelo: rude, arrogant, protective hunter, Christian: calm, deeply disturbed hunter that hates vampires, Vixen: witch lesbian, Jinx: computer lesbian, Meggy: sassy woman. That’s it. Now you know everything about each character. Literally that’s it. I’m not exaggerating they have nothing else to them. Tadaa.
-The overall plot is pretty uninspired. “Aaaaa there’s a demon!” Yep.
-The end battle is suuuuper uninspired, but I won’t say more bc I feel like I’ve already given too many details on other stuff.
-Did I mention D’Angelo wasn’t very likable?
-I think choosing Angel and D’Angelo as names could’ve been a little interesting, and they did acknowledge how similar they were. Specifically D’Angelo just renames Angel “Ansel.” They call it a nickname, but at that point I feel like he should’ve just been Ansel to begin with. It’s not really a good spinoff from Angel to begin with (yes I get D’Angelo picked “Ansel” because of the name’s meaning, but D’Angelo doesn’t seem like the type to know the meaning of names offhand. At least, it’s never indicated at any other point).
-Sometimes we’re told things that don’t really make sense based on stuff we’ve been shown. At one point, D’Angelo is like “Lorcán seems like deep down he really might be an okay guy,” but we’ve been given literally zero indication of this thus far. Yeah book two is about him so it’s probably true, and he does choose to help in the end, but other than that he’s just a big jerk. Still not as big a jerk as D’Angelo though.
-And finally, it’s never a good thing when spicy scenes make me laugh when they’re not supposed to. “Virgin passage”? Really? *Really*?
As for the narration, I’m never a fan of Joel Leslie and I pretty much only listen to his stuff when it’s free. This wasn’t his best, but it wasn’t as insufferable as some of his other narrations have been. Definitely middle of the road, so three stars.