This was a really adorable story. I loved the beginning especially, and the lead up to how Eamon turned into an ogre. “Cozy-ish fantasy” is a perfect way to describe this story. The found family vibes among the lovable band of outcasts was sweet. Alaric’s lute prowess was hilarious.

I will say that the middle half of the book where Eamon and Alaric are collecting potion ingredients sort of drags on. I was like, when do we see if Alaric turns into an ogre or not - can we get to that part already? And then when he did turn into an ogre, I was like… oh, this book is just gay Shrek. But then he turned back into a human and I was like… nevermind I guess?

I loved Lily’s character, she was written with so much adorable spunky attitude. I did like her character development when she acknowledges that Eamon is her family, and she actually doesn’t really care about meeting her biological sisters. I did want to see what her reaction was when she learns that Eamon turned into an ogre because of her (it was giving Joel and Ellie from “The Last of Us” vibes).

Really adorable, cozy-ish read. Many thanks to the author and publisher for the opportunity to have read an advanced copy this book for free. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

This is the perfect cozy, fantasy, romance. All of the characters were fun, intriguing, and made you want to know who they were and the authors showed us just enough of each character to want to see their days. The setting was fun but not so far fetched it was hard to picture and the main characters shined in there settings.
The narrator did a great job and his voice acting made it feel like you were watching an animated film. His character voices felt like a Jim Henson style fantasy which added to the fantasy element for me.

This is an adorable cozy fantasy romance. It is VERY cozy. It is close to Shrek - a grumpy ogre romance with a royal. The story opens with a tale of self-sacrifice when a mage sacrifices his life (in a way) to save a young wood sprite. He then adopts said wood sprite and raises her as his own. Fun fact: the sprite goes up to become a baker and aspires to win a baking competition. So cute. They are discovered by a wayward prince who is seeking the retired mage and potion ingredients to save the life of his brother. The prince, having been banished by his father, becomes absorbed into the little village of these misfit magic folk. Filled with magic, found family, and finding love in all the right places, this one is a warm hug.

The narrator did a great job on this one! His timbre was the perfect blend of snarky and warm.

While I'm don't regularly read cozy fantasy stories, I thought this might be the gentle break I need between larger, heavy books. I do think this book has promise, and although not *entirely* cozy (there are some pretty dark themes in here, albeit treated with gentle hands), I think reading a physical or e-copy would have made it better.

The audiobook narration, however, has some sound issues:
There's some quiet buzzing in the background that you only really notice in between chapters when it goes quiet.
My main issue is: *why* would you have only one narrator for a dual POV story, told in 1st person, that follows two men?
Thomas Busby is doing his best out here and has some lovely vocal qualities, but besides the (overly silly and sometimes hard to understand) voices he does for side characters, it's incredibly difficult to follow whose POV he's reading. A story told in 3rd person would have worked better for an MM romance like this. It didn't help that his voice while narrating Eamon's inside thoughts sounded nothing like his speaking voice (but it did sound like Prince Alaric's). We also dropped so many of the dialog/speech tags, which convoluted these scenes further.

All that to be said, I think this is a cute story for readers of the genre, but is best "eyeball-read" in lieu of the audio version.

Big thanks to NetGalley, Hadley Field, and the publisher for providing me with this audiobook ARC (so excited to be able to listen to more audiobooks from NG).