Three courts are in trouble at once when this audiobook opens, and the teenager holding one of them together is the same person who owes a favor to something called the Crone. The Vampire Court has no king. The Dragon Court has no heart. The Gargoyle Court has a protagonist who describes herself as in way over her head, three months after taking down Cyrus and roughly four minutes before everything begins collapsing again.
Our Take on Cherish
Nowhere on this record is the series named. The description calls it the massive number one New York Times bestselling series and calls this the sensational conclusion to it, then leaves the name out. Both series slots on the page sit empty. A buyer holding the word Cherish and nothing else cannot work out what this concludes, how many books come before it, or whether they already own any of them.
One June 24, 2023 response supplies what the seller would not, opening with a plain statement of fact: book six in the Crave series. That same reader describes a magically swoon-worthy, action-packed paranormal adventure filled with humor, wit, banter, angst, bargains and love, praises characters who have grown visibly across the sequence, and calls the world building detailed. That is a review doing the metadata's job, and it should not have to.
The shelving compounds the problem. This record is filed under teen and young adult, which is right, and tagged Mystery, Thriller and Suspense, which is not. Vampires, dragons, gargoyles, a Shadow Realm and a terrifying queen add up to paranormal romance, and every written response reaches for that vocabulary. Anyone browsing the thriller tag will not want this, and everyone who does want it is looking somewhere else.
Series endings are their own genre, and the responses suggest this one lands where it needs to. A June 1, 2023 verdict describes going in braced to cry and crying anyway, less because of the ending than because of the quality of the wrap-up, and calls Cherish a therapeutic conclusion to a series that changed the reader's life. Whatever you make of that register, it is the register the last volume of a six-book romantasy has to reach.
The same response identifies the specific pleasure on offer: packing an enormous amount into a single novel while still leaving readers wanting more. Seventeen hours and twenty-five minutes is a long final volume, and the plot the description outlines justifies the length, with a return to the Shadow Realm, a bargain struck with a queen, a rescue attempt for Mekhi, and Hudson keeping a secret from the person closest to him.
Heather Costa reads for Tantor Audio, and the casting logic is sound for first-person young adult fantasy: one voice carrying a protagonist who is present, wry and frequently overwhelmed. Long series told entirely from inside a single head depend on that continuity, and a final installment is where the familiarity of a reader's voice pays off most for anyone who arrived at the recording earlier in the sequence.
What to Watch For in Cherish
Publication day produced the strangest entry in the written record, and it repays unpicking. A response filed on May 30, 2023, the day the book appeared, is graded five stars and opens in pure anticipation: a cousin ordered it, it has finally arrived, the reader cannot wait to start. Then the same response continues in a completely different mood, reporting lots of plot holes, a book that got worse as it progressed, and an admission of never finishing it.
That one response explains the gap between the numbers. Five written verdicts sit on this page graded five, five, five, five and four, averaging 4.8, while the counter across 105 ratings reads 4.5. A star awarded before reading and never revised is one mechanism by which those two figures separate. Read the bodies rather than the grades on a series finale, where the rating often measures loyalty to five previous books instead of a verdict on this one.
Spoilers are a genuine hazard here, and the seller creates them. The description opens by telling you Cyrus was taken down three months earlier, which resolves the previous volume in its first sentence, and it then names three courts by their current state of collapse. Anyone who has not finished the series should avoid reading the product description entirely, which is an awkward instruction to give about the only information the page provides.
The tag, the missing series data and the spoiler-heavy copy share one cause: nobody treated this listing as the last book of six. A final volume needs a series name, a number, and a description that assumes prior knowledge without broadcasting it. This page offers a one-word title that could belong to any romance published this decade, and leaves the identification work to a reviewer who happened to spell it out.
Who Should Listen to Cherish
Crave completists are the entire audience and need no convincing; their only question is whether the finale delivers. A June 2, 2023 four-star response is the most useful guide for them. That reader went through the whole series back to back, rates the second through fourth books highest, found the fifth acceptable, and calls Cherish good but front-loaded with filler and rushed at the close, wishing it carried the depth of the earlier volumes.
Starting at book six is not an option, and the same four-star response shows why: it ends confused about who two characters in the epilogue are, guessing they might be children, after reading all five predecessors in one continuous stretch. If a reader that thoroughly prepared finishes uncertain, a newcomer has no chance at all. That response also mentions waiting a week for a physical copy to arrive, which tells you where the pool's reading actually happened.
Finishing a six-book series is a promise more than a purchase, and this recording keeps it for the people who have been waiting. Expect a long, busy, emotional close with the courts in ruins and old debts being collected, rather than a tightly disciplined novel. Buy it because you have read the other five. Then look up the series name before you search, because this page will not tell you what it belongs to.
At a Glance
- Narrator: Heather Costa carries the whole finale for Tantor Audio, a single-voice casting on a series told entirely from inside one teenager's head.
- Subjects: three collapsing supernatural courts, a bargain with a queen, secrets kept between partners, a series ending
- Tone: Frantic, emotional, unabashedly maximalist
- Bottom line: The finale Crave readers have been waiting for, sold from a page that never once names the series.
