Collaring Chaz

Dante's Infernal, Book 2

By: Joel Abernathy

Narrated by: Kaeomakana Tiwanak, Michael Dean

Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's Summary

Chaz

Rafael is the best friend-with-benefits a guy could ask for, but I had to go and screw it all up by falling in love.

Everyone gets sick of me eventually. My birth parents, the endless conveyor belt of foster homes, even the band that became my family. Why should Raf be any different? When he wants to take our friendship to the next level by welcoming me into his world of collars and pet names that make me feel wanted and cherished, I know it can’t be permanent. No matter what he says, there’s no way someone like him could actually want me forever. But I’m going to enjoy pretending for as long as it lasts.

Rafael

I spent so long pining after my best friend, I didn’t even realize the perfect guy was right under my nose.

Chaz is an adorkable goofball who’s kept a band full of hotheads from melting down on numerous occasions, and he and I are perfectly in sync in and out of the bedroom. Turns out he’s also a natural submissive who just might be the pup I’ve always wanted...if I can convince him this thing between us is meant to last forever, and not just be a one-hit wonder.

Collaring Chaz is a surprisingly sweet M/M rock star romance loaded with angst, band drama, contractual pup play, a cinnamon roll MC struggling with mental health and addiction, and a dominant rock god who saves him.

©2021 Joel Abernathy (P)2021 Podium Audio

Voice of Chaz 😳

Unfortunately, I could not listen to this book. I love Michael Dean and can overlook the intense narration of sexy time, but I could not stand the voice of the other guy. This might be a good book but I unfortunately could not get past the high pitched pre-puberty voice of Chaz.

This is a return for me 😞

I wanted to love this as I did the first in the series but the narrator for Chaz was just awful, at times sounding like a cartoon character. Michael Dean was his usual awesome self, although Dante with what sounded like an Irish accent was jarring. I hung in as long as I could but couldn't finish it.

Chaz….. Uhg

The narration for Chaz is absolutely horrid. I wanted to read this but couldn’t
get through the first chapters. The other narrator is excellent. Why would they ruin what could have been a perfectly good book?????? It’s so squeaky and sounds like a fourteen year old. Dang it.

Disappointing Narration

I have to agree with what a lot of the other reviews say: the narration was rough to get through. The narrator who read as Chaz was particularly difficult, but whoever read as Rafael did a rough job of doing other voices, especially Dante and Sterling. It was just weird. I really liked the story though.

Good Story Bad Narrators

The story was really engaging but, the voice of Chaz was hard to stomach 😕. I wish the narrators were the same from the first book.

Disappointing performance

The series is engaging and exciting but the performance is really hard to get past. Definitely not the right voices for the characters I envision in my mind.

Story is a fave, but narration is not

I’m honestly really, REALLY sad. This is my favorite book in the Dante’s Infernal series, but this audiobook is a return for me. I read this as text and I was SO exciting for this to be released in audiobook after listening to the first one. But I really don’t understand why Podium Audio decided that each book in this story would have new narrators??? I would’ve been perfectly happy if the 2 narrators for the first audiobook was kept for the entire series.

Michael Dean is admittedly not a fave of mine, even though I know a lot of m/m romance listeners love him. I actually think his normal narration is fine. It’s just his sex scenes I hate. It’s too over-the-top and it’s just uncomfortable to listen to. I wanted to give another audiobook narrated by him the benefit of the doubt, but alas. He narrates this one AND book 4, so it looks like I will not own all the audiobooks for this series and stick to re-reading these books by text.

Kaeomakana Tiwanak is new-to-me and I had listened to samples of his audiobooks before (but his voice is not part of the sample for this audiobook). And I thought I would be fine? But his voices for the characters is way too jarring. Maybe he is the perfect compliment for a narration with Michael Dean, because Tiwanak overacts too, and not just the sex scenes. There’s weird pauses between words within the same sentence and it sounds really strange to me even if I try to speed up the audio. Words are also pronounced oddly at times, but I’m just guessing it’s due to regional accents.

Ultimately, I’m very sad about the decision to change narrators throughout this series and that my favorite book in this series is such a miss as an audiobook. I did not finish this.

wrong narrators chosen

I know that a lot of people had issues with one of the narrators, but I think, with the right recording situation, Tiwanek could do justice to another genre. He's not a bad narrator, but something about the recording quality and this particular story-with all its dark and sexual content-was a perfect storm of awkwardness. I think Tiwanek could read children's books much more effectively. he would probably be great, actually.


It didn't help that the contrast between the two narrators was so stark.


I'm actually a huge fan of Michael Dean, but I think he was the wrong choice for this book as well.


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Finding out that Chas had been experiencing schizophrenia the whole time was a bit of a shock when he hadn't been showing the signs of it. I would have been able to buy bipolar disorder due to his bouts of mania, so it was a weird twist. This book definitely made less sense than the first one.

Bad narration hurts solid writing

Tiwanak's performance as Chaz makes his character sound fully nonsexual, and it's really out of place in a bdsm erotica book. It's not the pitch or timbre of his voice, it's how he reads things. His enthusiasm sounds like he's a kid having fun at the playground, not an adult getting aroused by the sex he's having.

Raf also sounds much older than he should, older than Cash or Drake even, but it's bearable at least because his emotions aren't too out of step with the character.

Writing is very good as erotica goes. The idea of a hard rock band being as popular as pop idols in 2020 is dubious, and those aspects make it sound 20-40 years out of date, but it's easy enough to suspend disbelief to enjoy the fantasy.

❤️swooon❤️

Another great story. I am so in love with these characters. Wish they were a real band.

Bad story terrible narration

This book reads like a badly written gay 50 shades fan fiction. It is not good. The worst thing though is the awful narrators. They have the tone all wrong. They sound stupid trying to fake accents (none of which are consistent), the cadence and inflections are all wrong. I have no idea how someone thought this was a high enough standard to publish. Asking for a refund.

Dire narration!!

The narration of this book is dire! The voices are inconsistent and change accents randomly - one character became Irish at several points in the book

There are also some timeline inconsistencies in the first third of the book which are annoying

The story itself is flimsy but I did make it to the end and will continue to book three. Book one was much better

One brilliant narrator, one really irritating.

This book is OK, if you've listened to the first one you'll be fine with this one. the thing which lets it down is the narration by Kaeomakana - his voice is nasal and high pitched, his secondary accents are ridiculous and annoying. Michael Dean is, as always, great and the saving grace which stopped me returning this book.

Was hoping for more

I started the first book of the series (Taming Dante) and I absolutely loved it, so I came to the second with similar expectations. However, there are a few things that made the experience bad and -most probably- destroyed the book.

The one, major thing was the narrator of Chaz. Out of every single audiobook I've read, his voice is far the most annoying, emotionless, robotical and comical voice I've heard. The side characters that were voiced by Chaz's narrator were similar to listening to a cartoon villain or a parent trying to act out a different character in a children's book. It threw me off and everytime he was on, I wished the chapter would end and Rafael's one would come up.

Other than that, I felt that the story was much more superficial that the first book's, with the BDSM playing a very small and rather irrelevant role in the story. It was not so much connected to either of the main characters' built-up and, honestly, other than adding a kink element in the sex scenes, it served as nothing more than a character quirk.

I did appreciate the subtleness and respect of the mental illness described and, of course, the erotic scenes were pretty well written and acted out.

I honestly believe that I would have liked this book so much more if a different person was casted for the role of Chaz.

Long journey but HEA

I really appreciated how sensitively mental illness was dealt with in this story, showing the impact but not making it the main plot.

Well done kink as well with some very hot scenes.