Bound

The Divine, Book 4

By: M. R. Forbes

Narrated by: Jeff Hays

Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

My name is Landon Hamilton.

I'm in hell.

I was sacrificed to save the world, and imprisoned with the very thing that sought to destroy it. I could handle that, except the love of my afterlife is stuck here with me, and the monster in this cage has all of eternity for payback.

Even worse? Our only hope of escaping this torment rests with the vampire who set it loose to begin with.

I hope it was worth it.

Bound is the fourth book in the best-selling Divine Series, a paranormal/urban and contemporary fantasy set in New York City and around the world. It is 100,000 words long, and is suitable for adults, both young and old.

©2014 Michael Forbes (P)2014 Michael Forbes

Love this author, but...

I loved the Hells Rejects series which was my initial encounter with the work of M. R Forbes and the amazing performance of Jeff Hays. This series started out as well as I could have hoped for. However, this novel which picks up from the final occurrence in the previous novel has been quite difficult to enjoy as much as all previous novels due to the dual intertwined yet separate main characters story lines. Add to that all the different names and ‘hosts’ held by most of the entire cast of main characters and it became quite tough to just sit back and listen to while doing other things. Typically I listen to audiobooks while I’m doing other things as others might do with music. Being a former lifelong professional musician, I’m honestly tired of music as it reminds me of what I can no longer do making me both sad and angry. So instead I listen to audiobooks. I’ve been powering through hundreds of hours of books every week for a few years now. Before, I’d typically only listen to audiobooks while I was in bed trying to fall asleep. So I never bought books with complex plots or stories since they’d get my attention and because of how my brain is wired...keep me awake listening.

The point of this review is to let the author and performer both know that I think they did their usual terrific job in a very difficult scenario set up by the first three books. I hope book five will be more like the first few and not similar to this book in how the story is told, etc. This is the first time I’ve not given all five stars for each of the three categories. I had to go back and re-listen to several chapters to figure out what I must have missed because of how this book needed to be told and the complexity of both the characters and story. I’m not angry, but I thought I’d just mention why I gave the ratings I gave.

I recommend this series as well as the Hells Rejects series to anyone who enjoys excellent fantasy based stories that have vey interesting characters fully developed and a wonderfully new style of narration. These two artists take full advantage of their born talents AND are smart enough to use modern recording technology to enhance the performance. Now off to begin book five.

A hard one to get through.

This is the fourth book in the devine series. Unfortunately, for me the quality of the series has steadily been going down hill with each book. What started off as a lively, fun novel with a great world and characters you could root for turned into a book where I cared enough about the outcome to finish reading, but just barely. If I could have found a synopsis online I would have stopped listening altogether.

This is a werid novel and all the ingredients are there for a great book (good narrarator, cool story, interesting characters lots of action) but it just doesn't quite work. It's like someone made a cake with all the right ingredients and followed the instructions but it still came out tasting bad. I am not quite sure why.

The book is ok, but barely a 3 in my opinion. I had to fight hard to finish this book as it became extremely tedious. One problem is splitting the point of view from a single landon point to two characters. The author kept bouncing back from one view to another so fast I couldn't really get interested in one story line before he moved onto the next.

Another problem is for some reason this book creates a high degree of frustration for me while reading it. I don't want a Mary Sue by any stretch but you never feel like the characters are winning they just fail again and again and miraculously pull things out at the end. It's more like the main characters are led around by their noses by circumstances and the actions of offscreen characters rather than making decisions for themsleves.

It says a lot for the quality of the previous books that I was invested enough to finish this one just to find out how things turned out. It isn't an awful book, but I just can't get into this one even though I liked the previous ones. Based on this book I think I will leave the series here as it concludes tidily enough I don't have enough questions to bother listening to any more in the series.

If you want to see how the series turns out get this book otherwise I'd advise taking a pass.

One of the best of the series!

loved it and wish I had more time to finish it sooner. The narrator is excellent.

Amazing Story

I read fairly quick. I am into the story all the way. if you read the previous ones naturally you are not by going to miss this. Love it. Reading the next one, Evolution. Love the narration as well. Wonderful job making me feel all the emotions.