Before Midnight by Jennifer Blackstream

Before Midnight by Jennifer BlackstreamNarration by Matt Addis

Before Midnight is the debut book in the paranormal romance series, Blood Prince, featuring five blood princes (a werewolf, a vampire, a demon, an angel, and a god) who control their own kingdoms in overlapping space but each of whom plays a part in the overarching suspense arc of the series. Each story features a retelling of a different fairy tale and contains its own standalone romance. Moreover, for audiobook lovers, I’m delighted to say that Matt Addis’ narration was fabulous! While the entire series is currently available in e-book format, so far only the first three books have been recorded and released in audiobook format (all of which I’m pleased to say are performed by Mr. Addis).

In Before Midnight, we meet Prince Etienne, the Prince Charming of the tale. Prince Etienne is a werewolf. In this paranormal world there are two types of werewolves – those who are born that way and those who are cursed to become werewolves by a bite. Prince Etienne was born a werewolf but due to a spell of a local witch, who had been trying to help him but cursed him instead, he is losing his supernatural werewolf abilities and becoming more human each day. His only chance of recovering his full werewolf strength (which he, and his family, use to defend their kingdom) lies in finding a mate who was cursed into becoming a werewolf by a bite (which is rare).

Loupe, the heroine, is this retelling’s Cinderella. Her father has passed away leaving her with an evil step-mother and her two step-sisters. They treat Loupe horribly, but are unaware that due to a bite she has been turned into a werewolf, as she has hidden her forced shapeshifting by the full moon from them, knowing that they would treat her even worse if they knew. Somehow, she has managed to cope with this adversity all on her own, knowing that she could never marry as she might kill her husband when she is forced to turn into a werewolf and has no control. Then she meets Prince Etienne who makes her dream of having more, but she doesn’t know he is also a werewolf.

Could there possibly be a HEA in the cards for Prince Etienne and Loupe?

New to me narrator, Matt Addis blew me away with his sexy and talented rendition of this tale. Interestingly, while Mr. Addis has produced over 80 titles (primarily mysteries/thrillers) on Audible, only six of them are in the romance genre (3 of which are books in this series). However, you would never be able to tell, as I felt he did a very good job with the romantic elements of this book (a talent that sometimes is difficult for non-romance narrators to achieve). In that regard, I really enjoyed Mr. Addis’ attention to the mood of the scene and his adeptness at making the listener feel the longing and passion between the hero and heroine. Mr. Addis also does a remarkable job of making the listener feel the urgency and tense nature of the high suspense scenes.

Perhaps what I loved the most about Mr. Addis’ performance, however, is his naturally deep and sexy voice which I felt was well suited to voice the hero dialogue parts. You can just hear the confident, alpha nature of Prince Etienne from Mr. Addis’ rendition. Given how great Mr. Addis was at the male parts (including by distinguishing his voice for the other male characters so that you could tell them apart from Prince Etienne just by the sound of his voice), I was doubly impressed that he was able to create naturally distinguishable female voices as well. From the sweet intonation of his voicing of Loupe to the despicable, harsher sounding evil step-mother, I thought Mr. Addis did a stellar job of creating personality appropriate voices for both the female and male characters in this tale.

All in all, if you love paranormal romance and fairy tale retellings, then Before Midnight is definitely worth a listen especially given the memorable narrator performance by Matt Addis.

BJ


Narration: A

Book Content: B

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence Rating: Minimal

Genre: Paranormal Romance

Publisher: Skeleton Key Publishing

Before Midnight was provided to AudioGals by the author for a review.

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