Forty-one hours. FORTY-ONE HOURS. Look, I love a chunky audiobook — I actively seek them out because a good one means I don't have to think about my next listen for weeks — but Drew Hayes really said "what if I wrote the entire junior year of superhero college in real time" and then actually did it. And I'm mad because it worked. I burned through this thing across roughly three weeks of commutes, a weekend deep-clean of my apartment, and one very late Sunday night where I told Kevin I was going to bed but instead sat in the dark kitchen listening to a training montage for another two hours.
TL;DR: Worth your commute. All 41 hours of it.
The Pacing Problem That Isn't Actually a Problem
Okay so here's the thing about Year 3 that's going to lose some people: it's slow. Like, there are stretches where you're watching these kids do combat drills and ethics classes and interpersonal drama and you think "when does the plot kick in?" And then you realize — oh, the character development IS the plot. Hayes is running a long con. He's been building these people for two full books (plus Corpies if you're doing it right), and Year 3 is where the emotional compound interest starts paying out.
Vince's growth from earnest golden retriever to someone grappling with real moral weight? That hits different when you've spent 80+ hours with him already. The investigation subplot hanging over Melbrook keeps this low-grade tension humming underneath everything — like a background process eating CPU you can't quite identify. You know something's going to break. You just don't know when.
The off-campus missions are where Hayes finally lets the stakes get real. Characters get hurt in ways that matter, alliances shift, and there's this persistent sense that the safety net of Lander is fraying. I won't spoil specifics, but there's a sequence toward the back third involving multiple concurrent threats that had me actually missing my stop at Mountain View. Had to double back. Zero regrets.
Kyle McCarley Is Carrying 40+ Characters on His Back
Kyle McCarley is not Ray Porter. (I know, I know, I bring him up in every review. It's a problem.) But McCarley is doing something genuinely impressive here — he's maintaining distinct, consistent voices across a cast that has to be pushing 50 named characters by book three. His Vince has this earnest warmth, his Chad is all controlled confidence, and he nails the tonal shifts between Hayes's humor beats and the heavier emotional moments.
That said — and this is the one thing that kept bugging me — he sometimes blows right through section breaks without pausing. Hayes jumps POVs a lot, and when McCarley doesn't give you that beat of silence, you're suddenly in someone else's head mid-sentence and your 6AM brain is going "wait, who am I now?" It happened maybe a dozen times across 41 hours, which isn't terrible, but on a packed Caltrain where you're already fighting consciousness, it's enough to make you rewind.
Also: his voice for Shimmerpath. Some people hate it. I found it a little uncanny-valley — like he was going for ethereal but landed somewhere slightly alien? Not a dealbreaker, but if that character had more screen time it might've been.
His comedic timing though — genuinely excellent. Hayes writes these dry, deadpan character interactions that could fall flat in audio, and McCarley lands them almost every time. There's a particular running bit with Roy that made me laugh out loud on the train like a weirdo.
This Is Basically My Hero Academia But for People Who Read Worm
If you're into superhero fiction that takes the "what does it actually cost to be a hero" question seriously — not grimdark serious, but genuinely thoughtful — this series is basically doing what MHA does but with 10x the character depth and none of the filler arcs. Year 3 specifically is where Hayes stops pulling punches on the political and ethical dimensions. The HCP isn't just a school anymore; it's a system, and systems have agendas.
Perfect for: train, road trips, long commutes, gym sessions where you're doing steady-state cardio. Skip for: bedtime (you WILL lose track of the POV shifts if you're drowsy), background listening.
Who's This Actually For?
If you haven't read Years 1 and 2, stop, go back, start from the beginning. This is not a standalone. If you've already done the first two books and you're wondering if the series maintains — yes. Emphatically yes. Year 3 is the strongest entry so far. The ROI on this audiobook is absurd: 41 hours of content, and maybe 3-4 of those feel like padding. For a book this long, that's a remarkable hit rate.
If you bounced off the series because "superhero college" sounds tropey — fair, but you're wrong. Hayes earns every trope he uses.
I'm already three hours into Year 4. Kevin says I have a problem. Kevin is correct. The only other audiobook that's made me feel this kind of "I know I should stop but I physically cannot" compulsion was Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ — which sounds like the most random comparison imaginable, but that narrator locked me into a 15-hour epic I had zero intention of finishing in one weekend.
