Guest Review: Where He Ends and I Begin (Home, #3) by Cardeno C.

Jake Owens, aggressive, physical, blunt and brave, is a football hero turned city cop. Nate Richardson, his best friend since before forever, is thoughtful, quiet, and kind, a brilliant doctor who has always known who he is and that Jake is the love of his life—and loyal, courageous, straight Jake has never had a clue.

But Jake has been nursing his own case of the unrequiteds, and he’s never been as straight as Nate assumes. Nate may think their passionate explosion is a fluke, a result of too much closeness for too long, but Jake is bound and determined to prove to him otherwise. For Jake, the question isn’t how they ended up in bed together... it’s how can he convince Nate that he wants and needs to stay there.
Listening Length: 7 hours and 55 minutes
Narrator: Alexander Collins

Guest Reviewer: Chelsea

Story:

Sometimes these types of books work for me and other times they just don’t. You know the type, that too sweet, too easy, too unrealistic type of relationship book. That is Jake and Nate's story.

Nate and Jake have been inseparable since birth and are as close as two people can be. They start a romantic/sexual relationship when they’re twenty eight, which is where the novel begins.

Really not much happens in this story; these two are in love and stay in love. At the beginning they both had huge amounts of insecurities that I found unrealistic for two men who have been best friends for twenty-eight years. This did get better as their relationship progressed, but then they had nothing that added conflict in their relationship, it was all fluffy rainbows and butterflies and this was only at about 45%.

There was a lot of reminiscing about their childhood and growing up together, so this gave a bit more story to their current cushy lives, but it did get a bit much when almost every chapter had a large portion of the past in it.

The way the dual point of view (POV) was written was an odd and quite frankly annoying choice. Quite often we’d hear a chapter from Jake's POV and then the next chapter would be repeating the previous chapter just in Nate's POV. There was hardly any new information given and the repetition became well...repetitive and left me wanting to skim to get to a chapter that progressed the story.

Narration:

The narration by Alexander Collins had a few issues that I couldn’t quite overcome to fully engage in the story .

His choice of voices for Jake and Nate left me giggling, rolling my eyes and looking behind my shoulder for the stalker following me. Jake had a very baritone voice, it made it hard to emote at all and words that were accentuated, such as ‘cock’ and ‘touching’, left me feeling a little dirty while listening to them. Nate’s voice was definitely not creepy and was much more suited to him, however it was constantly whiny. I felt like he’d burst into tears every time he spoke.

After a while I became more used to his voice and the choice of characters voices, however the accentuated words still felt a bit off. He’d accentuate some words constantly like ‘touching’ that I couldn’t help roll my eyes every time it was said (and it's said frequently!). He also seemed to lack enthusiasm in certain parts of the story that I felt required it, like he was getting bored, or maybe that was just me.



In the end this was a very sweet story about true love lasting forever and the sex was hot in true Cardeno style, but overall I got bored quite quickly and felt the narration lacked enthusiasm. This would definitely work for a large amount of readers, but I was not one of them.

For more information on Goodreads or Booklikes!