Crossing Swords

By: Mixie Edwards

Narrated by: Michael Mola

Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

Christopher Rush is not gay.

But after a breakup with his longtime girlfriend, he finds himself crossing swords with his best friend Jeremy Pratt. Who's also not...gay.

It was a one-time thing.

It didn't mean anything.

They like girls.

At least, that's what these boys of summer tell themselves as they pretend it wasn't more than experimentation. With only four weeks left before they leave town for college, Christopher and Jeremy awkwardly navigate their way through a series of unfortunate (or very fortunate) events. Often leaving them breathless, conflicted, and dressed in nothing but a pair of socks.

Because socks are less gay.

As their time together comes to an end, will Christopher and Jeremy accept that love doesn't discriminate, or will they put their swords up for good?

©2017 Mary Elizabeth (P)2017 Mary Elizabeth

Best story for me this year

I read this book about 2 months ago and it was so amazing that up had to get the Audiobook... so Please see my review of this book in kindle Amazon.
Story = 5 stars.. Such a deliciously hot, funny and sexy story
Narration= 4.3 stars-I would have scored the narration higher except for the background sounds. I listened to the book's twice already. Michael Mola was the perfect choice.
Overall= 4.7 stars
Charo

Decent

I actually liked the story and the narration was good but the audio editing needed work. The character used some terms I wasn't comfortable with personally and more than once I found myself think wtf, but I think it added to the characters/ relationship and made them more 3-dimensional. The internalized homophobia is very real in this friends to lovers gay for you romantic dynamic. The voice actor differentiated the characters, the sexy scenes were hot, and they performed well. Unfortunately the narration also echoed half the time and it also repeated lines from editing mistakes that were never removed. These are pretty basic editing fixes that should have been addressed but weren't. I'm hoping the 2nd book will have improved these things.

Serious editing needed

This happens a lot in Audible & other recorded media. The narrator decides they don’t like how they read a line so they repeat it differently. I think editors get lazy and don’t catch it as they listen before publishing. There were a lot of repeated lines.

This story is cute but about an hour or more too long. Their situations and responses didn’t change enough so you heard the same conflict over and over again until you don’t care anymore or don’t believe the conflict.

The narrator was great and sounded age appropriate to the characters.

Narration is a little off, but not bad.

I don’t know how many times I’ve passed this gem by because the cover wasn’t appealing to me. I was pleasantly surprised by the storyline (double GFY/new adult), although I know Mixie Edwards has gotten a lot of slack for how both boys behave. To be fair; it might be a little over the top when you take all the physical fighting into consideration, but it’s still a good read. It’s best to remember that it is a fictitious book and if every author tried not to offend everyone, we’d have some dull books floating around. The only caveat I have about the book is the narration. While Michael Mola did a great job of playing a bunch of teenagers, the audio itself is a little choppy. Some sentences are repeated, you can tell he’s chewing gum, some chapters have different volume levels, and at one point, it sounded like a herd of geese flew by his window. He really did nail the expression part of the story, though—it was just as I imagined it would be from the book. Because of that, I’m able to look past the audio blips and file this bad boy on my re-listen list.

Oh boy

If you are a stickler for politically corr ct, move along, this book isn’t for you. Silliness, immaturity and some hot sex scenes, plus humor, if you aren’t stuck on being politically correct, is what you’ll find here.

I’m sorry, but the narrator didn’t prep for this book and apparently there was no editing or proofing. Loads of mistakes by him. Numerous repeats of the same sentences and phrases in error.

just didn't grab me

There isn't anything particularly wrong with this "coming of age" story, personally, i just struggled to engage with it or become invested in the characters.

For me, sometimes the language was just too crass, there were too many misogynistic references and unnecessary "f" bombs (one 36 minute chapter uses it 61 times). I get that it's the behaviour of some eighteen year old boys, but used excessively I find it unnecessary and distracting to the story.

Given the quality of the narration/editing that is available these days, this production really needs to be better edited for background noise and repeated phrases. The narrator did a reasonable job, but I would have liked more distinction between the two main characters, sometimes I found it difficult to distinguish which character was at the forefront.

So much yes!

I absolutely loved this coming of age m/m story! Her debut is just perfect. It'd crass, funny, honest, and simply spicy! Michael did a fair job, there was some background noises that took away from some of the scenes, but overall I enjoyed it. I've reread this book four times and it's still as good as the first.

Mixed Feelings

I have mixed feelings about Crossing Swords. This book is intended as a humorous, coming-of-age story about two best friends who explore their attraction towards each other a few weeks before they go to college. Although there were a lot of attempts at being funny in the book, a lot of it fell flat and felt too immature to truly fit my humor style. The two main characters were two young guys on the verge of adulthood, but instead of having any type of character growth, the main characters were stuck in this never-ending immaturity rut. It became tedious. I think if the second book, a short novella of which I’ve only read the blurb, was combined with the first one, this story may have been better. The second book seems to have more character growth and redeems the main characters and put their previous behavior in perspective. This is all just conjecture because I haven’t read it yet, although I will soon. Yet, despite all of the negative things about the book, I still liked parts of it, and I was still interested in Christopher and Jeremy’s story. I just wished they grew up a little.

The audiobook was narrated by Michael Mola, who has a very nice voice. However, the production and editing of this audiobook was horrible. There were repeated phrases and sections, weird background noises, different audio/microphone tones, and a strange, echoey tinny sound that colored some of the narration. This audiobook needed a much better producer and editor.

Such a good book!

This was such a good book! I couldn't stop listening to it! I will say they use the words "gay" and fag a lot. I can't wait to listen to more by this author 😍😍

Funny story

Crossing Swords was a funny and possibly realistic story about 2 hetero best friends who discover they have a thing for each other. There was a lot of jabbing at each other in denial of what was happening and over time I hoped they would stop the poking at each other but I guess that’s just how they were together. The narrator was good but the recording needs some work as the room or equipment it was recorded with didn’t seem to add to the narration and there were a lot of stops and starts where several words were repeated within a sentence. Cleaning up the narration (recording itself, not the narrator as he did a good job) would help improve the overall audiobook.