Venom & Vow

De: Anna-Marie McLemore, Elliot McLemore

Narrado por: MW Cartozian Wilson, Vico Ortiz

Two enemy kingdoms are forced to work together to break a curse in this lush YA fantasy, featuring a transgender prince and a bigender dama/assassin in the lead roles.

Keep your enemy closer.

Cade McKenna is a transgender prince who’s doubling for his brother. Valencia Palafox is a young dama attending the future queen of Eliana. Gael Palma is the infamous boy assassin Cade has vowed to protect. Patrick McKenna is the reluctant heir to a kingdom, and the prince Gael has vowed to destroy.

Cade doesn’t know that Gael and Valencia are the same person. Valencia doesn’t know that every time she thinks she’s fighting Patrick, she’s fighting Cade. And when Cade and Valencia blame each other for a devastating enchantment that takes both their families, neither of them realizes that they have far more dangerous enemies.

Cowritten by married writing team Anna-Marie and Elliott McLemore, Venom & Vow is a lush and powerful YA novel about owning your power and becoming who you really are—no matter the cost.

©2023 Anna-Marie McLemore and Elliot McLemore (P)2023 Recorded Books

Excellent story + great audio performances

I’m not normally into fantasy or stories with monarchies, but I LOVED this novel. The plot was very well developed, the trans rep was done well, and there were enough twists and turns to keep me on my toes. Going to check out more by this author.
Both performers were good but Vico Ortiz was PHENOMENAL. Definitely going to check out more works they’ve read for. The accents were excellent. The only thing was that the performer playing Cade didn’t use the Irish accent that Vico Ortiz gave him and the other clearly Irish characters, so it was a little odd as they switched perspectives each chapter but it didn’t throw me off enough to bother me.
Some descriptions of body and weapon placement during fights left me a little confused but I just carried on, settling on “okay fighting is happening, the specifics are less important”.

The amount of acceptance was amazing

I loved it it was a great read and the voices enhanced the whole thing

Very enjoyable and with interesting characters

Lovable and interesting characters. And with a wonderful voice actor for the character Val. Nice fantasy setting.

Incredibly different quality between the narrators

This book has two narrators, one who should teach classes on how to do audiobook narration and one who honestly had to check wasn’t AI because his reading was so robotic. The preview features Vico, who is wonderful, but fails to give us MW. Vico also gives us difference in voices between characters, including accents to match their nationalities (or fantasy representations of them), but since they give one of those to the second POV character, & MW doesn’t bother with it, it’s jarring to go back and forth and go, oh, yeah, that’s supposed to be Cade. Would’ve been better to have Vico do both POVs.

While I like that both characters had disabilities and were transmasculine, for like half the book they just kind of felt the same. Like they approached those elements in the exact same way, plus they were both convinced the other was the bad guy, so they were also approaching that conflict with the same feelings about it.

Towards the end, some elements seemed to come out of nowhere (though I admit that Cade’s chapters were so poorly narrated that I had trouble following them). I also found some points where we seemed to go back in time between the two POVS but not to catch up to the other. It made it even harder to follow.

I’m very sorry because Vico was my favorite narrator of an audiobook last year, and Anna-Marie McLemore was one of the authors of my favorite new read last year, so I was overjoyed to find them paired for this book. It was quite disappointing.