Clara’s Verdict
Robert Muchamore’s CHERUB series has always occupied a peculiar niche: intelligent, morally complex spy fiction aimed at teenagers but embarrassingly readable by adults who ought to know better. Guardian Angel, the fourteenth entry in the sprawling franchise, proves the second series has finally hit its stride. Where the opening instalment of CHERUB 2 felt like a tentative reboot – new recruits, new dynamics, a world anxious about its own legacy – this one lands with the confident thump of a series that has remembered what it is for. It is fast, sharp, and considerably darker than anything you expect to find shelved alongside school stories.
Narrated by Simon Scardifield, this audiobook runs to just under six hours. It is an ideal commute companion, though I warn you now: you will miss your stop.
About the audiobook
Ryan has saved Ethan’s life more than once. Ethan, an ordinary boy growing up inside extraordinary privilege, has decided his mysterious protector must be a guardian angel. He is not entirely wrong about the protection – only about the source of it. Ryan is a CHERUB agent, a child operative working for a clandestine organisation whose greatest tactical advantage is precisely what every adult in the world overlooks: children. Even the most experienced criminals, the most paranoid of cartel bosses, never imagine for a moment that the teenager hovering nearby might be their destruction.
Ethan’s family sits at the apex of a billion-dollar criminal empire. Ryan’s mission is to dismantle it from within. The complication, and it is a real one, is that Ethan is not a villain. He is a boy who happened to be born into the wrong family, and Ryan – despite every operational training session telling him otherwise – has begun to care about him. Can Ryan complete his mission without destroying the one person he has genuinely come to regard as a friend?
Muchamore is astute enough to understand that the most interesting moral territory in spy fiction is not the exotic tradecraft but the human cost. CHERUB has always asked what it means to send children into danger, to make them instrumentalise friendship, to train them to lie to people who trust them. Guardian Angel presses on that bruise with particular insistence.
The narration
Simon Scardifield has been the voice of the CHERUB world for some time, and it shows. His performance is confident without being showy – he understands these characters well enough to play them rather than simply read them. The pacing is brisk, which suits Muchamore’s propulsive prose, and Scardifield navigates the range of supporting voices – Ethan’s entitled world, the CHERUB handlers, the criminal milieu – without ever tipping into caricature. For a series aimed at younger listeners, the production values are entirely respectable, and Scardifield’s clean diction ensures nothing is lost.
What readers say
Listeners who have followed the series tend to come to Guardian Angel with some wariness about the second CHERUB generation, and the audiobook community broadly reflects that initial scepticism giving way to enthusiastic revision. One reader who had devoured all thirteen preceding books reported picking this one up the moment it appeared on the Amazon store, initially unsure the new series could match the intensity of the original – and finding themselves completely won over. Another noted that the new characters Ryan and Ning, who had not initially charmed, grew on them considerably here. A third reviewer, an adult who described Muchamore’s books as a guilty pleasure, argued persuasively that they put more credible criminals on the page than many ostensibly more literary spy novels. The audiobook holds a rating of 4.7 out of 5, though from a small number of reviewers – the books remain better known in their print form.
Who should listen?
Anyone aged twelve and upwards who has any interest whatsoever in spy fiction should start the CHERUB series at book one and read through in sequence – the world-building rewards patience and the emotional stakes accumulate over many volumes. If you have already made that journey, Guardian Angel is reassuring evidence that the second generation is growing into something worth staying for. Adult listeners who enjoy action-driven moral complexity – and who perhaps feel slightly self-conscious reaching for teenage fiction – should feel no shame here. Muchamore writes better than he is usually given credit for, and Scardifield’s narration makes this an easy, rewarding listen. Listen to Guardian Angel on Audible UK and discover why the CHERUB franchise has never really gone away.
