Devilry by Marley Valentine

Narrated by Cooper North and Aiden Snow

Having enjoyed Marley Valentine’s Without You, I was pleased to learn another of her books would be making it into audio format, and seeing that Devilry also had two excellent narrators attached, I eagerly requested a review copy. Caveat Emptor, I suppose, because while Cooper North and Aiden Snow are great, I’m really struggling to remember much about the actual story. Which is, quite possibly, because there isn’t very much of it, and what there IS is stretched very thinly for an almost ten hour audiobook.

Elijah Williams comes from a small town in Texas filled with small-minded people – including his ultra conservative parents – and couldn’t get out of there fast enough. He’s been the subject of his father’s criticism all his life, but when, aged sixteen, Elijah was discovered making out with another boy, things went from bad to worse. His father – the local pastor – pretty much disowned him and hasn’t spoken to him since. Two years later, Elijah has earned a scholarship to the prestigious King University in Washington DC, and hopes at last to be able to live honestly and on his own terms.

Cole Huxley has recently relocated to DC to take up a professorship at King in the Arts and Humanities department. He’s openly gay and comfortable with who he is, although he’s never had a long-term relationship or met anyone who’s made him want anything more than something casual.

Elijah and Cole bump into each other – well, more accurately, they collide when they’re both out running, and Elijah tries to avoid falling over Cole (who has stopped to tie his laces) by leaping over him but doesn’t quite make it – on the first day of the semester. Both men feel an instant zing of attraction, but Elijah gets flustered when the other guy appears to be flirting with him – surely this gorgeous man can’t possibly be interested in him? – and after an awkward goodbye, he limps back to his room. So much for his first day at university – his ankle is too painful for him to be able to attend his classes, so it’s not until the following week that he realises the guy he almost knocked down is one of his professors. And Cole is just as surprised to discover that the beautiful young man he hasn’t been able to get out of his mind all week is one of his students.

Now, I knew going into this that it was a student/professor romance, but both leads are consenting adults, so the only real taboo here is that Cole is responsible for grading Eli’s work – not that that situation ever arises or is addressed in the book. The thing that DID bother me, however, was the way in which Cole is so immediately on board the mental lusting train; he’s thirty-one and thinking like a horny teenager, and quite honestly should have known better than to have allowed himself to pursue his physical attraction to Eli. Yes, I know – there would be no story otherwise, but there is no compelling reason for him to pursue it. He’s a grown man and could have made the decision to walk away, but he chooses not to, and it’s a decision he appears to make very easily. I was expecting internal struggles and a real sense of longing for something – someone – he couldn’t have, but instead we get a character who just lets his libido take the lead without any real consideration of the issues he should have been wrestling with.

In fact, Eli comes off as the more mature of the two, even though he’s fourteen years younger, he’s a virgin and has no experience of relationships whatsoever. He’s still feeling his way in life, still working out how to be his true self – but he’s spent many years hiding who he is and being made to feel unworthy, it’s hard conditioning to shake off. He’s as attracted to Cole as Cole is to him, and there’s never any question of his being ‘led’ into anything he doesn’t want (he’s an active and enthusiastic partner when things turn sexual) but he has as much – if not more – to lose as Cole does, and again, is willing to risk it with very little thought.

Other things that bothered me. When Elijah is late to his first class, Cole is hostile and actually sets out to make him uncomfortable, which is totally unprofessional. Later in the book, Cole and his friends go to a restaurant where he knows that Elijah and his friends have gone to celebrate Elijah’s birthday, just so he could see Elijah on the day – and believed it was a good idea. This is a THIRTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD MAN behaving like a lovesick schoolgirl. And THEN he does something even more dumb.

Despite the fact that Cole is in his early thirties, Devilry has a very New Adult feel about it – and not in a good way. Him/Us and The Understatement of the Year are NA and are among my all-time favourite audiobooks, so I don’t dismiss the sub-genre out of hand despite not being the target audience. (I’m an Old Adult!) But some of the NA titles I’ve listened to – including this one – are subject to such massive amounts of first-person-present navel-gazing and clichéd ‘woe-is-me’ inner monologuing that all I want to do is yell “just get on with the story already!” The leads would be having a conversation that consisted of about four lines of dialogue and PAGES of internal monologue; if one of them asked a question, it would take so long to get to the answer that by the time we got there, I’d forgotten what the question was!

There’s no question that Marley Valentine is a gifted writer and can spin out some truly lovely prose, but this is a novella-length story stretched to fill the space of a full-length novel; there’s hardly any plot and the middle chunk of the book is repetitive and largely redundant. In fact, the best description of it I’ve seen is from the Goodreads reviewer who called it – “more or less poetic smut sprinkled with plot.”

Aiden Snow and Cooper North saved me from going out of my mind with boredom, but it was a close-run thing at times. Both narrators are experienced in m/m romance and I’ve enjoyed listening to them individually, but I think this is the first time they’ve worked together – and the end result is a good one. Mr. Snow narrates the chapters from Cole’s PoV, and his rich, deep voice is a good fit for a confident, older man (well, older than Elijah!) while Cooper North portrays Elijah’s mix of determination and vulnerability really well. The emotional highs and lows and the sex scenes are nicely done – expressive without going over the top – and they do a good job of putting across the attraction and connection between Cole and Elijah. Both perform female characters believably and are able to differentiate effectively between the various secondary characters and the two principals – although there were times Cole and Elijah sounded a little too similar (both narrators were guilty of that) and I had to rely on the dialogue tags to work out who was speaking. But that was infrequent and the performances are equally good overall.

But sadly, even the work of two such accomplished performers couldn’t disguise the flaws in Devilry – which wasn’t very devilish at all. I’m in a minority though – there’s a shedload of 4 and 5 star reviews for the book on Goodreads, so maybe it’s a case of “it’s not you, it’s me” – but I’m not able to recommend it.

Caz

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