Story Rating: 4 stars
Audio Rating: 4 stars
Narrator: Michael Ferraiuolo
Length: 6 hours, 57 minutes
Audiobook Buy Links: Amazon/Audible | iBooks | Author Website
Book Buy Links: Amazon | iBooks
Teremie Summers was devasted when his boyfriend walked out and spread lies about Teremie being a cheater all over social media. Teremie is now a meme and often called terrible names in public. His Only Fae channel does well, as many people will pay to watch Teremie put on elf ears and take off the rest.
When Teremie gets cast in a fantasy movie along with his best friend, Rory, the pair move to Michigan, where the movie is being filmed. But right from the start, there are strange things happening to Teremie. There are animals outside his door every day and a gold coin is following him. Teremie thought he was being pranked at first, but the coin seems to be predicting the outcome of upcoming events.
The other issue is Kade. Kade was a child actor and is looking for a comeback and Teremie is immediately drawn to the wolf shifter. Kade has never been attracted to a man before and Teremie knows he isn’t in this attraction alone, but there always seems to be something keeping the men apart.
When the men find themselves in a fantasy scene that feels all too real, Teremie and Kade have to find their way back before they are vanquished forever.
As part of the Fortune Favors the Fae multi-author collection, this story can be read as a standalone, as the coin is what connects the books to each other. The book is fun from the start as Teremie’s story unfolds. His ex betrayed him and then sold him out with lies in a public way and now everywhere Teremie goes, he gets called out for things he didn’t do that people believe are true.
Teremie is now on set with a small movie role that he is shocked to get. It’s there he meets Kade, as well as a small supporting cast of characters. The world here isn’t developed for me from the start. There are vampires and werewolves and other magical creatures that coexist with humans and there is no explanation or structure to the world that carried through.
One of the highlights of the book is seeing Teremie grow throughout the book and find his place and his people. The chemistry between Teremie and Kade is electric from the beginning and that started things off well. But as soon as they get together, they have to stay apart and Kade ghosts Teremie with no explanation, so that then decreased the momentum for me. There are a lot of clues as to what is going on here. I wasn’t even actively trying to figure this story, but it wasn’t that difficult to see where it was headed. There is a high fantasy scene at the end that seemed a little out of place to me given the rest of the book and not all of it came together for me in a cohesive story, yet it was still enjoyable as a whole.
Michael Ferraiuolo narrated Teremie’s journey and it is a great way to consume this story. There are a lot of voices and accents here and Ferraiuolo is skilled with that. The book is told from Teremie’s POV, but each character has their own voice. Ferraiuolo’s narrative style is theatrical in a Shakesperean way, which didn’t always fit the style of the book. One of the focal points in the story is Teremie and some others having a contest to see who can stay with the accent of their movie character the longest. This adds a lot of accents to the book. It was fun at first, but it went on too long with too many different accents all of the time. Then, the characters’ internal dialogues had no accents and it continued like this for the entire book. The characters never dropped the fake accents and it would have been more fun for me if it was for a limited time.
Overall, this is a fun fantasy novel with roots in the contemporary world where anything can happen and does.
