Something Wicked
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Something Wicked
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Narrated by:
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James Amherst
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By:
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Eden Winters
About this listen
A mysterious legacy. A magical journey. The worst guide in history!
Piers Adams never knew his parents or birthplace. All he wants from his mundane life is a better apartment and fewer working hours serving drinks at a club in Asheville, North Carolina. Sure, weirdness happens around him occasionally. Coincidences, right? He can’t possibly wish things into existence. After all, he’s only human. Maybe.
It’s hard living down to a nickname like Wicked, but Prince Wycke Bertillian of the magical realm tries. He enjoys his lack of responsibilities until he’s coerced into a clandestine mission: find an evil sorceress’s hidden son in the human realm. A chance encounter awakens magical potential beyond what either realm has seen before.
Barely managing his own life doesn’t qualify Wycke to guide a novice sorcerer with infinite magic and zero self-preservation skills. Unfortunately, it’s Wycke or nothing standing between Piers and those who’d take Piers’ magic for themselves—magic powerful enough to rule two realms.
Piers and Wycke had better get their act together. Their lives and the fate of the human and magical worlds rests in their highly incompetent hands.
©2022 Eden Winters (P)2025 Eden WintersListeners also enjoyed...
What listeners say about Something Wicked
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Belinda Zamora
- 04-03-25
Great adventure
Rip roaring roller coaster of an adventure.
Filled with plenty of hilarious situations, a perfectly snarky familiar, (seriously, Chynne is the best) action, danger, drama, suspense, intrigue and more twists and turns than you can shake a stick at.
Wycke and Piers were absolutely perfect together, their chemistry was sizzling.
I also enjoy the sense of found family aspect and I can't wait for the next adventure to begin.
The narrator did an amazing job bringing these characters to life.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Caz
- 07-02-25
Overlong & under-edited, narration a mixed-bag
Something Wicked is best described as fantasy with romantic elements, the story of two rather hapless young men trying to save a magical realm from falling under the rule of an evil sorceress. Piers has never known his parents, and now he’s aged out of foster care, he just wants a decent place to live and a better job – but he supposes he can’t have everything, even though sometimes good things seem to just fall into his lap.
Prince Wycke Bertillian is your common-or-garden playboy prince; he sleeps with anything with a pulse, eschews responsibility and is more than happy with his carefree existence. His sister, Saris, asks him to cross into the human realm to see if he can find out what became of the baby son of the powerful sorceress, Nyvanda, who she helped send into the human world before Nyvanda was arrested and stripped of her magic some years before.
There’s a LOT of set-up, and Piers and Wycke don’t meet until around a quarter of the way through the story. They meet, they dance around each other for a bit, they shag and their magics bond – although neither of them knows who the other is or what has happened. It takes Chynne, Nyvanda’s former familiar – who usually takes the form of a fast-talking, snarky cat – to spell it out for them, and then they discover that those loyal to Nyvanda are after Piers, for reasons as yet unknown. Piers and Wycke, Saris, Chynne and their magical allies (among them an elf who owns a coffee shop, and a good-natured ogre named George) have to band together to save the magical world. Which would be so much easier if Piers or Wycke had the faintest idea how to actually use their magic.
There are a lot of moving parts in this story, but sadly, they don’t fit together to form a cohesive whole. It’s slow to start and there’s a lot of set up – the first dozen chapters (which, in audio, amounts to over three hours) are exposition - and the pacing is all over the place. Some things that should have been explained in more detail are glossed over, others are dragged on interminably, and the worldbuilding is sketchy to say the least. I didn’t understand why an immensely powerful sorceress wasn’t able to escape or prevent her castle being stormed; there’s no magical system to speak of – magic happens because it does – and for a book billed as a gay romance, there’s very little chemistry between Piers and Wycke, no real romantic development and just a hint of an HFN by the end.
And then there’s the narration. James Amherst is new-to-me and he does a lot of things very well indeed. His performance is well paced and expressive, he has a good range of character voices, the English accent he employs for the people of the magical realm is very good and consistent, and I loved his portrayal of George the friendly ogre. BUT. He has an incredibly irritating kind of sing-song intonation that drove me nuts, and almost constantly mispronounces Piers as “Pierce”. I suspect that part of the reason I found the book so hard to get into and focus on was because of that annoying cadence; when a narrator has a specific vocal ‘tick’ you can’t unhear, it makes it difficult to concentrate on what’s being said rather than how it’s being said and I probably missed certain plot points because the narration was so distracting.
Something Wicked has the bones of a good story, but it’s overlong and under-edited, the leads are bland and lack agency (almost everything they do is reactive – they’re never in control of the situation) and the ending is rushed and anticlimactic. I did find the narration a bit easier to listen to as time wore on, but I can’t say that I’ll be rushing to listen to Mr. Amherst again.
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