Wake Me Up Inside

Mates Collection, Book 1

By: Cardeno C.

Narrated by: Charlie David

Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's Summary

A powerful Alpha wolf shifter and a strong-willed human overcome traditions ingrained over generations and uncover long-buried secrets to fulfill their destiny as true mates.

Regarded as the strongest wolf shifter in generations, Alpha Zev Hassick is surprised and confused by his attraction to his best friend. His very human, very male best friend. A male shifter has to mate with a female shifter to keep his humanity, so shifters can't be gay. Yet, everything inside Zev tells him Jonah is his true mate.

Maintaining a relationship with the man he has loved since childhood isn't easy for Jonah Marvel, but he won't let distance or Zev's odd family get in their way. When unexplained ailments begin to plague Jonah, he needs to save his own life and sanity in order to have a future with Zev.

Zev and Jonah know they're destined for each other, but they must overcome traditions ingrained over generations and long-buried secrets to fulfill their destiny.

Word count: 74,755

©2012 Cardeno C. (P)2017 Cardeno C.

Friends to Lovers (and Mates!)

Any additional comments?

Wow. What a difference the second edition makes! The POVs between Jonah and Zev are much more balanced, the story flows better with some changes to the dialogue, and it all works really well.

I'm still not a fan of the deliberate separation in the story, I mean...I can't help but wonder that there wasn't a school closer to pack grounds that Jonah could have gone to?

But I digress. Regardless of their separation, I love how much Zev loves and lives for Jonah, only wanting him to succeed and be happy. It makes my heart gooey.

Charlie David does a great job bringing across the emotion of the story, and it's an easy story to listen and get lost in.

This series is just wonderful, whether to read or listen to.

so cute...

so the two mc's had basically known each other their whole lives. before they are even aware of anything, they had been meant to be. so cute and so sweet. love love love.
charlie david is really fricken great, he's one of them ones that I'm just amazed af about. whew.

MM Fated Mates Shifter Romance

I very much enjoyed this shifter romance. There was really no angst with the MCs and they met at a very young age. I really like the take on fated mates and I thought it made sense. I also very much enjoyed both MCs especially Zev. Zev was such an endearing character and just rolled with the punches. He did not take anything too seriously while also taking it seriously. He just did not let things get him down, but rather just wanted to understand. Jonah also wanted to understand everything that was happening and it was great to hear how it was told and how he was able to understand. I thought it was great that once Zev's family found out he had a male fated mate they were alright with it, and there was not unnecessary drama there. I thoroughly enjoyed the side characters in Lori & Toby as well as the newcomers at the end and look forward to reading the rest of this series. Charlie David performed the narration on this, and he did a great job.

No, just no. So much no.

Wow, uh? This is real bad. Unlistenable bad.

The author somehow manages to shoehorn acephobia and biphobia into the first 70 pages for absolutely no reason. Zev tells Jonah he's never felt attracted to boys OR girls, and Jonah says, "You're an 18-year-old boy. You can't expect to believe you're asexual." ...HUH? Age and gender have nothing to do with asexuality. What an unnecessary, offensive remark to shove into the conversation when the point of it should just be that Zev only sees Jonah. No need to be disgusting toward asexuals to make that point, Cardeno C. No need to follow it up with biphobic remarks a few chapters later, either. Zev asks Jonah if he kissed any cheerleaders back in the day, and Jonah responds by shoving the *ahem* physical evidence of his interest against Zev, saying essentially, "I was just joking about you being stupid, but maybe you are. Feel that? That's not a banana. It's proof I don't like girls. I'm gay." Jesus Christ. Putting the embarrassingly cringey banana line aside, this is such an offensive way to communicate this. Bisexuals exist! It's not absurd or "stupid" for Zev to ASK! That is literally the point of the conversation, to find out each other's romantic history! Jonah can answer without implying that being into a man means kissing cheerleaders is oh-so-obviously-impossible and anyone would be stupid to think otherwise. Yuck, way too much anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment for an m/m book. Just proof m/m writers can't necessarily be trusted to understand LGBTQ+ issues. Some can only be trusted to care about porn, not people.

If you ignore all that awfulness, what you're left with is still a bottom tier book. There's no sense of time or place. Locations and time periods jump abruptly and linger in certain places for no clear reason. The prose sounds awkward and amateurish. The dialogue is unnatural and corny. The plot is nonexistent, and there are way too many scenes and moments that just... Make no sense. (Do you really expect me to believe a college-aged Zev, who attended human high school, didn't understand how human sex works? Nonsense!) I don't know if I've EVER been this so aggressively BORED listening to (or attempting to read!) a book in the last year, and I am an AVID reader who burns through books daily.

Narration is just as bad as the book. Even with the speed set to 1.3x, the narrator sounds like a tired sloth. Extremely monotone. Dialogue has no life. Characters are indistinguishable. Heck, sometimes sentences are indistinguishable, what with all the awkward and inaccurate starts and stops mid-sentence. This is made worse by the story HEAD-JUMPING every few paragraphs. We start out with only Zev's perspective, and then all the sudden we're jumping into Jonah's mind MID-SCENE, then back to Zev's STILL in the middle of the same scene. In audiobook format, it's extremely grating because their voices are identical so you'll randomly be in a different character's POV without understanding why. SO unnecessary. But it's honestly just as annoying to head-jump so much in ebook format.

Did I mention Jonah pops a--banana--while hugging wolf Zev? Hm... No.

Just no.

Sweet Listen

So this was a bit of a different take on the shifter world which I enjoyed very much. The characters were great and the overall story was intriguing and keep you interested. David does a good job with the narration making it an overall enjoyable listen.

Heartmelting

The love between Zev and Jonah have a live that literally jumps off the page and into your heart. one of the best books I've ever read. Or rather, listened to. This was my first book by this author and narrator. It won't be the last.

Zev and Jonah

Good lord these two had a hard road to travel. Years of being connected and knowing that they are true mates had Zev going more than a bit crazy. I loved that he wasn't willing to stand in the way of Jonah's dreams of becoming a doctor. I kept wishing he'd just explain everything to Jonah. I was worried for a while about Jonah's state of mind. There's a bit of mystery and intrigue that adds an exciting element to the story.
Highly recommended author

Audiobook: Great narrator

Very enjoyable

The connection between Zev and Jonah starts when they were very young, neither one realizing just what will be between them later in life. Both stay true to each other, while Jonah gets his degree and becomes a doctor. Along the way, questions are answered as to how a human and shifter can be true mates. It was easy to listen to once I adjusted the speed on my phone, which is what I listened with.

Zev and Jonah's lifelong bond.

I was in serious need of a good shifters story, it had been a while for me, and this was just the perfect book to hook me in this series!
I loved how the book spans throughout Zev and Jonah's lives, and follows their evolving, yet somehow "stalled" relationship.
Charlie David is a great narrator, and I can't wait to listen to book 2!

Great story. Loved the boys

This book was a fantastic story of Zev and Jonah finding their true mate and love. I didn’t want this to end. These boys were so sweet and what they had to go through or time wait to be able to be together was so sad as you knew they were better together.

I listened to the story as well and Charlie did a fantastic job with his narration and kept me not wanting to stop listening when I had too.

Great Mates

I loved this friends to lovers and mates audiobook. The story flows really well building up to when they can be together.
Charlie David is perfect. His rich smooth voice brings across the emotions, especially for Zev. Perfect.

as good as the ebook

The story is always full stars, because if I wouldn't like the story as ebook, I wouldn't listen to the audiobook. I can't listen to an audiobook without knowing the book, that's not possible for me.

The performance from the narrator is also very important for me. I can't listen to a lot, because my English as a non-native-speaker isn't so perfect to follow a whole story over hours, when the narrator speaks too fast or too sloppy. Normally I have to SEE the person, who is talking to me in English. It took me a little bit, to come into the narrator, but at the end, it worked. I only have to take a few breaks between. I'm just not yet finish with the book, but I listen enough to give a review.

PLEASE READ MY RATING SYSTEM!!!

To my ratings:

5* - very very good
it's like an A+

4* - very good and will be often re-listening
it's like an A

3* - it's more then a one-time-listening.
it's like a B

Poor audio

I liked the story and the performance was good, with the exception of the one voice that was given an echo effect.
The audio quality, rated under 'overall' in lack of a 'technics' option, was poor. Most of the chapters had a humming noise in the background, and the narrator recorded all his saliva noise.

I love a good shifter book.

This is the only audio I have listened to for Cardeno C and it will not be the last.
You know from the beginning that these 2 would end up together but the story inbetween is fantastic, what I thought different with this story is that you get to know the characters from a very early age and how their friendship turns into love even with all the obstacles in the way..
Charlie David did a great job narrating this book..