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I don't usually shelf books when I abandon them this quickly, but I feel the need to say it: You can tell when a prep has written a book.

🎧 Audiobook: My Funny Demon Valentine-Hell Bent #1

✍🏾 Author: Aurora Ascher -new to me author

📅Publication date: 10/31/21, Audiobook: 2/18/25 | Read: 2/28/25

Genre: Fantasy, Paranormal Romance

Tropes: demons, angels, found family, hidden truths, secret identity

🗣️Narrator: Kirsten Leigh voices all the characters with standouts from Eva and Ash. The reading style brought the text to life, and the author and narrator worked together perfectly. The pacing and flow allowed me to get lost in the story. The narrator paused and announced new chapters and there was a table of contents which helped me follow along.

🏃🏾‍➡️Run Time: 10:21

🌎 Setting: Montreal

👆🏾POV: 3rd person, multiple

⚠️TW: marijuana use-h

Summary: Asmodeus and his 3 brothers have escaped Hell and come to Earth to live freely. Eva is a musician/artist in love with jazz. Ash plays piano and loves jazz too, so when he meets Eva, he's taken with her. All hell breaks loose when Eva is thrown into the demon world.

👩🏾 Heroine: Evangeline "Eva" Gregory -27, a violinist, plays at a jazz club. Able to see through Ash's curse

👨🏾 Hero: Asmodeus "Ash"-cursed demon turns into 7-foot monster; wants to play jazz music but fated to be evil

🎭 Other Characters:
*Belial, Mephistopheles, Raum-Ash's brothers who escaped Hell with him
*Skye-Eva's BFF, just sworn off men for 6 mos.
*Jacqui + Dan- Eva's parents
*Mishetsumephtai-The Hunter
* Naiamah-A succubus Queen of Hell indebted to Belial

🤔 My Thoughts: I requested this based on the title and was surprised how good it was. A demon/human love story with a big reveal at the end. The brothers were hilarious, and I can't wait to read the rest of the series!

Rating: 4/5 ✨
Spice level 4/5🔥 open door, explicit sex

🙏🏾Thanks to NetGalley, RB Media| Recorded Books, and Aurora Ascher for this ALC! I voluntarily give my honest review, and all opinions are my own.

Honestly the first half of this book was hard to read. The second half tho was so fun and I really enjoyed it. The writing isn't my favorite. and Eva was incredibly irritating. The romance itself was okay I did like it and they were cute together. The plot and concept are REALLY good but I feel like it could have used more editing. A lot of this book just annoyed me tbh.

This was such a fun read for me and was shocked at the bad reviews. IGNORE them. This books is super cute & funny. I love these demon boys.

Description
Asmodeus, Prince of Hell, just wants to make music. Jazz, specifically. Unfortunately, he’s a demon. And he’s supposed to be evil.
Clearly, for Ash, a career as a musician isn’t exactly an option. Plus, he’s cursed. Sick of playing by the rules, Ash and his three brothers escape Hell in search of freedom on Earth. But it’s harder than they thought to keep their enemies off their tails . . .
Yet everything changes for Ash when he meets a beautiful violinist who can see through his curse. No matter the risk, he has to have her.
Evangeline Gregory is just your average human. She works at a jazz bar, plays gigs on weekends . . . and, apparently, hallucinates demons.
At least that’s what Eva tells herself when, moments after she meets the man of her dreams, she sees him shift into a 7-foot-tall monster. Not believing her own eyes, Eva decides to investigate and soon finds herself in the middle of a supernatural clusterf**k.. But Ash isn’t the only one keeping secrets, and the search for answers reveals a shocking truth that will change Eva’s life forever. Or maybe just doom it. The path to love can be complete Hell.

Thanks to NetGalley & RB Media for the ARL of this book!

My Funny Demon Valentine
by Aurora Ascher
Narrated by Kirsten Leigh
Book 1 of Hell Bent
RBmedia | Recorded Books

Asmodeos and his three brothers just want to escape Hell and live a normal life on Earth. For Ash, that means a chance to enjoy music and accepting that his curse makes him invisible to women. However, a beautiful violinist not only sees through his curse but also loves his music. Eva was just trying to get to know the smoking hot guy who caught her eye when she witnesses something that just can't be true, so she ignores it and finds out that Ahs is not only hot, he has a pure heart... which makes the fact that he's a former prince of Hell even harder to believe. They'll have to face major revelations and foes from both sides of the divide if they want to see where the music takes them.

Eva and Ash are equally interesting, and it's fun to see them discover things about themselves even as they're getting to know each other. Ascher's decision to give you both sides of the story by jumping from one POV to another and letting you know how everyone is feeling at one time helps their almost instantaneous romance make sense even as everything around it is utterly fantastical.

I'm amazed at how wholesomely sweet some of the scenes and character relationships are in a book that was sold to me on its insane spiciness. It was a nice little surprise that I think helped make it stand out from others like it and has me excited to see what's next for the demon brothers. Because we don't just get Eva and Ash's side of the story, Ascher drops bits and pieces of how the brothers feel and what's happening around them that fill out the world and make it interesting and original.

The narration by Kirsten Leigh is good at getting emotions and growliness into scenes, but there were a couple of times when I wasn't sure if a line was said by Eva or one of the guys.


Delighted thanks to NetGalley and RBmedia for the great listen and getting me hooked on an author new to me!

🅑🅞🅞🅚 🅡🅔🅥🅘🅔🅦 𝓜𝔂 𝓕𝓾𝓷𝓷𝔂 𝓓𝓮𝓶𝓸𝓷 𝓥𝓪𝓵𝓮𝓷𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓮. “It looked like a pug crossed with Gollum. A pig crossed with a bat. A monkey crossed with Yoda who had bashed its face into a brick wall too many times. It was just ugly in every possible way.”
- @aurora.ascher.author way to describe a gargoyle 🤣. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️✨ 4.5
🌶️ 🌶️🌶️ 3.
MY FUNNY DEMON VALENTINE FEATURES EVANGALINE A VIOLINIST WHO HAS A SECRET HER PARENTS HAVE BEEN HIDING HER ENTIERE LIFE FROM HER.
SHE MEETS ASMEODEUS, PRINCE OF HELL WHO IS A LUST DEMON. ASH IS SUPPOSED TO BE EVIL BUT HE IS A HILARIOUS, KIND, DEMON. HE HAS A CURSE THAT NO ONE THINKS HE IS AN INTERESTING PERSON, AND CANT SMELL, TASTE OR FEEL. EVA IS THE ONLY ONE TO SEE THROUGH HIS CURSE. HE ESCAPES HELL WITH HIS BROTHERS AND QUICKLY BECOMES THE UNDERWORLDS MOST WANTED: DUE THEM ALL EXPERIENCING FEELINGS WHICH THEY SHOULDN ‘T FEEL.. THIS BOOK IS A HILARIOUS , PARANORMAL, FANTASY TRILOGY THAT AURORA’S TONE MADE ME LAUGH OUT LOUD AND CRY. I LITTLERY LISTENED TO THIS BOOK IN ONE DAY IT WAS SO GOOD. THERE ARE TWO MORE BOOKS COMING OUT SOON! I WANT TO THANK @aurora.ascher.author for providing me with a complimentary audio book via @netgalley You are a talented author and i will be listening to the next two books in the hellbent series. 💜 😈

I went into My Funny Demon Valentine expecting a light, holiday-themed romp, but turns out, this has absolutely nothing to do with Valentine’s Day—and honestly, I’m not mad about it. What I got instead was a story with way more depth than I anticipated. It’s funny, yes, but it also has heart, intriguing world-building, and characters that actually feel real (even the demonic ones). I was pleasantly surprised by how invested I became. If you’re looking for something clever, entertaining, and a little offbeat, this one’s worth the read.

**audiobook review** 3* writing, 4* narration

BOOK CONTENT: My Funny Demon Valentine tells the love story of Ash (a demon) and Eva (not a demon) over a period of a couple weeks. Their musical connection was written beautifully, and they are a perfect match in terms of how completely awkward they both are. The plot and world-building were clearly explained and mapped out. The spice was entertaining. Everyone in this book is physically gorgeous, obviously. My main critique is that this book is about 4x longer than it needed to be. Whole chapters had no point, just reiterating things that were said in the previous paragraphs/chapters. Is your memory a little off so that it would be helpful to be reminded about 6000x that Ash is a demon? Then this is the book for you. You also don't need to worry about thought or communication, because the conversations are so, so painfully detailed and repetitive that the reader has no need to process anything, because it will be repeated at least 3 times. The ending was also horribly unsatisfying. Everything is so detailed throughout the book, but then she just screws over Eva's mother completely without any resolution. Why was Rome included? I listened to this book with my partner, who constantly complained about how horrible this book was. I'm still giving it three stars though, because we cracked up laughing so often that this was an enjoyable enough read, even though it was not good writing. The laughing was entirely due to the awkwardness of the characters/conversations and the sheer repetitiveness and pointlessness of so many parts. Did you forget Ash was a demon?!

NARRATION: My Funny Demon Valentine is narrated by a single person. She did a great job differentiating between characters, and added personality to the words. I definitely found her bringing more life to conversations that otherwise would have been excruciatingly painful to read in my head due to their repetitiveness.

A copy of this audiobook was provided by RBmedia via NetGalley for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

This audiobook was everything!! I loved it so much. The characters are great. There was humor, spice, seriousness. It was just a wonderful listen. Top tier.

This was a fun read that I really enjoyed. The banter was funny and none of the characters fell flat for me. I will say that the chemistry was a tiny bit lacking between the characters but other than that I don't really have any notes on the characters. The only semi- major problems I had with this were the narrating at points and the pacing. I feel as if the FMC figured out his secret a little to fast and the narrating fell a little flat. There wasn't a lot of variation between the characters voices so sometimes I was confused about who was talking and the guy's voices weren't all that great and I found myself cringing a little bit at times. Overall though I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a fun spicy paranormal read.

⭐️3.8 Stars⭐️
Thank you to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read My Funny Demon Valentine! I really enjoyed this book so much! This was a perfect February read and the narrator for the audiobook did such an amazing job! I really enjoyed the characters introduced in this book (especially the demon brothers) and the relationship between the characters. I loved seeing the brothers develop as the book went on and the relationship between Ash and Eva. The writing style wasn’t my favorite but it didn’t stop me from enjoying the audiobook! The ending has me so excited to read the next book and see where this series will go with all the characters! Thank you again to NetGalley for letting me read this amazing book!💕📚

I've found my newest obsession! The story and the characters are amazing but the audiobook makes it even better somehow. There isn't a single side character that I didn't like enough to wish there was a book for them as well.

I had an absolute blast with this book! It was the perfect mix of silly and spicy, keeping me entertained from start to finish. I can’t wait to dive into the rest of the series! I listened to the audiobook, and Kirsten Leigh’s narration was phenomenal—she truly brought the story and characters to life.

Eek. This one was a flop for me. It felt like the writing was a bit juvenile for how spicy this book was. The concept was there, but it just didn’t execute as well as as I would’ve liked. The narrator did a fine job with the female parts obviously but not with the male parts. I really hate when I can’t decipher who is who while I’m listening to a book.

This was cute sexy romantasy. I liked the fact that it was sexy while still having a plot. I'm delighted to see where the next book goes and what brother finds love next.

Thanks to Netgalley for this ARC. My Funny Demon Valentine by Aurora Asher, narrated in audiobook form, is a delightful and humorous listen that will keep you entertained from start to finish. The story blends romance, fantasy, and plenty of laughs as the main characters navigate an unexpected relationship with a demon. Asher’s writing is witty and charming, with fun characters that are easy to root for. The narrator’s performance adds depth to the story, bringing the humor and emotions to life. With great pacing and a fun plot, this audiobook is a perfect choice for fans of lighthearted paranormal romance.

Absolutely enjoyable! Great banter, lovable characters, and the spice was perfect. If you are looking for a fun fantasy rom-com, this is one you should check out.

Four demons sick of playing by the rules, escape Hell to live among humans. One of them being the Prince of Lust, who evidently is also cursed and is completely invisible to anyone who may find him attractive. Until he meets a beautiful violinist who can see right through his curse.

This was a very fast-paced read, it had me giggling and kicking my feet from all the banter especially between the brothers. Ash and Eva's relationship was adorable. And for a demon who didn't know what love was, he sure made me fall for him! I absolutely did not see that ending, and I'm definitely going to read book 2 in the series. I would recommend this book as a great palette cleanser in-between long series.

I got picked to listen to the audio book through Netgalley so this is my narrator's review bit: I really enjoyed Kirsten Leigh's narration for this book. She did a great job differentiating the characters and made it exciting to listen to.

Thank you RBmedia Audio, Aurora Ascher, and Netgalley for the ARC.

Thank you to NetGalley and RB Media/Recorded Books for the Review Copy of this audiobook.

From NetGalley description: Asmodeus, Prince of Hell, just wants to make music. Jazz, specifically. Unfortunately, he’s a demon. And he’s supposed to be evil. Evangeline Gregory is just your average human. She works at a jazz bar, plays gigs on weekends . . . and, apparently, hallucinates demons.

I had kept hearing good things about it so when I saw that the audiobook was available to request, I thought 'why not'? This was a quick and easy listen. The narration was good. Overall, it was not necessarily my 'cup of tea', but I would definitely recommend it to others interested in this type of book.

3.5 stars - My Funny Demon Valentine (by Aurora Ascher) is silly and corny at times, but also pretty entertaining for a paranormal romance. The demon brothers add plenty of character, and even though some parts are cringe, the lighthearted vibe and steamy scenes kept me turning pages. There’s explicit language, some violence, and a bunch of banter. If you’re in the mood for something over-the-top, I’d say give it a shot!

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC! 💖

I would like to thank the publisher for sending me an audio copy in exchange for an honest review through NetGalley.

Evangeline is playing at a club when she catches the eye of literally the hottest guy she has ever seen, so she goes over and talks to him and the two of them really hit it off. Too bad she shouldn't have been able to since he's cursed and, oh that's right, he's also Asmodeus, a Prince of Hell. When someone comes to the club going after Asmodeus and his brothers, he quickly escorts her out, only for her to follow him back in and watch as he transforms from sex-on-a-stick human to a seven-foot-tall red-skinned demon with wings, horns, and claws. Evangeline doesn't believe what she's seeing, so she decides to move past it. Ash was just hoping to escape with his brothers to earth in order to live new lives, but he's still being hunted, and they want to bring him back to hell. Will they be able to be together as their feelings for one another grow? Or has it been doomed from the start?

I love the concept of a demon who likes to play music. Ash was such a great character, from the moment he meets Eva and is absolutely confused by her and the attention she gives him to the moment he realizes he has feelings for her (which are gross. Because what demon has feelings like that?) And then admitting those feelings? (He DID tell her his stomach hurts when she's upset and his chest hurts when he thinks of her. Isn't that enough?) And then his interactions with his brothers are just everything. I hope we get more of them in the next books.

Eva was a fun character, but I loved her mom so much more. She was hilarious and seeing her interact with Ash's brothers was amazing. I think what I loved about this wasn't just the two main characters (although they were great and the spice was fabulous), but also the side characters. I feel like the combination of everyone made this book so much better than I thought it would be. Plus seeing things from their POVs was also excellent. Plus the plot was cute.

Overall, I enjoyed this. And I too would grab a demon's horns and call them love handles. (I mean, what else are they for?)