Since my review of the book Tangled by Emma Chase ended up getting a fair amount of traffic and I absolutely loved that book, I decided to review the second book in the series, Twisted. That being said, I’m going to come right out and say that while I did like this book, I thought that it was a rather disappointing follow-up to Tangled.
One of the reasons I gave Tangled such high praise in my review (My thoughts on Book #1 in the Tangled book series) was because I thought that Emma Chase did a great job of putting fresh spin on the romance novel genre by telling the story from Drew’s point of view since romance novels are typically told from the woman’s point of view. However, with the exception of the epilogue, which is told from Drew’s point of view, Twisted is told from Kate’s point of view. As a result, Twisted didn’t come across as being a book that put its own unique spin on the genre for the most part, and I also feel like waiting until the epilogue to shift the story to Drew’s point of view really caused the book to suffer as a whole, but I’ll explain why I feel this way later on in this review.
At the start of the book, it’s established that two years have passed since the end of Tangled. Kate and Drew seem very happy together, and the readers are treated to a rather steamy sex scene, which involves some anal sex. I don’t mean to over share here, but since this review is about my thoughts on the book, I’m just going to come right out and say that I’ve never thought of anal sex as being sexy, erotic, a turn-on or all that appealing, but I still thought the whole sex scene was rather hot despite my personal feelings regarding anal sex. The sex scenes in both this book and Tangled are definitely a lot steamier than the sex scenes in Fifty Shades of Grey, which pretty much all include the word “There” as a way to refer to various parts of Ana’s body WAY TOO MUCH! I especially enjoyed the part leading up to the anal sex where Kate handcuffed Drew to the bed before she went to the kitchen, only to have Drew somehow manage to free himself from the handcuffs and join her in the kitchen, which is where they ended up having sex.
As I said in my review of Tangled, I’m also in the process of reading Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, and as I’ve been reading that book, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the amount of time that E.L. James devotes to rather mundane events in the book compared to things that the reader is most likely going to view as being a very important detail is rather disproportionate, causing the story as a whole to move very slowly. I’m mentioning this because I thought it was very refreshing read a book where the author (Emma Chase) dives right into the main action of the story. Although, I do think that this book still has some issues when it comes to how suddenly the overall conflict of the story comes about.
Towards the beginning of the story, Kate vomits rather unexpectedly, which surprises her because she had been feeling just fine leading up to that moment. Since the whole vomiting incident happened without really any explanation or other symptoms of illness both leading up to it and following it, Kate and Drew went ahead with their plans to have dinner with Drew’s family. When they were having dinner with Drew’s family, Drew’s sister, Alexandra, or as Drew referred to her in Tangled, “The Bitch”, and her husband, Steven, announced to the family with Mackenzie’s help that they are having a baby.
This prompts Kate to realize that she might be pregnant, but she decides to wait until she’s able to see her gynecologist, Bobbie, to find out for sure, because she apparently doesn’t trust the accuracy of home pregnancy tests. When she arrives at her doctor’s office, she runs into an old friend, Daniel, but we don’t see him again after that. Bobbie confirms that Kate is indeed pregnant. Kate is initially unhappy about the fact that she’s pregnant, namely because of the timing of the pregnancy. After thinking about it for a little while, Kate decides that things will be okay and decides to tell Drew about the baby by giving him a baby t-shirt that she sees in the window of store, which had the words “Future Yankees Pitcher” printed on it.
However, as soon as Kate does that, she gets a strong feeling that she needs to go home and tell Drew that she’s pregnant right away. When she gets home, she finds Drew there, drunk, and making out with another woman. Drew tells Kate that he knows that she lied to him about where she was and that he had followed her, they fight, and I didn’t need to wait until I got to the end of the book to figure out that Drew had mistakenly come to the conclusion that Kate was having an affair when he was asking her if she was going to “end it”, which led Kate to think that he had figured out that she was pregnant and wanted her to get an abortion if they were going to stay together.
While I think it’s important for a story to not drag things out for an unnecessarily long time, especially when it comes to getting into the main action of the story, I feel that Chase handled the whole thing with Drew coming to the conclusion that Kate was having an affair rather poorly. Based on what Kate tells us, the reader, about the status of their relationship and what we are shown at the beginning of the book, Drew and Kate appear to still be very happy and in love with each other. There wasn’t really anything that was mentioned or shown in regards to their relationship to suggest that either of them would have any reason to be driven to cheat on the other. Sure, this book is written from Kate’s point of view, so she wouldn’t know with absolute certainty if there were something going on with Drew that was causing him to feel tempted to cheat on her, but there still weren’t any red flags to indicate to Kate or us, the reader, that the idea of Drew having an affair with another woman was even a legitimate possibility. Therefore, the complete lack of buildup to that moment really made the writing for this book as a whole feel rather contrived when it comes to the book having conflict that’s truly engaging, especially compared to Tangled, at least that’s the way I see it.
Even after having finished reading this book about a month ago, it’s still kind of hard for me to completely understand how Drew was able to come to the conclusion that Kate was cheating on him so quickly since the story was told from Kate’s point of view, and that’s big part of why I think this book would have been a lot better and a lot more interesting if it had been written from both Kate and Drew’s point of view. That way at least we, the reader, would have been able to understand how Drew came to the conclusion that Kate was cheating on him as quickly as he did. Sure, Kate did lie to him about where she was going when she went to see her doctor in order to get confirmation about whether or not she was pregnant, but as far as the reader knows Kate lying to Drew isn’t something that has happened enough times for their to be any genuine distrust in their relationship.
Plus, based on what Kate told the reader, it doesn’t sound like her lying about where she was going was going to be the first of an ongoing series of lies. She was simply going to lead Drew to believe that she had gone somewhere else until she got confirmation from her doctor that she was pregnant, and then she was going to tell Drew the truth about where she went. If Chase wanted to write the book as if she viewed Drew as not completely trusting Kate to begin with, she really could have done a better job of setting up that idea, and I truly believe that writing the book from both Kate and Drew’s point of view would have been the best way to do that.
After Kate finds Drew with the stripper and they essentially breakup, she decides to go stay with her mom where she stays in bed for days. Eventually, she gets out of bed and starts helping out at the diner where her mom works. She also reconnects with her ex-boyfriend, Billy, from Tangled. Billy’s music career has apparently really taken off in the two years that had passed since the events that took place in Tangled. When she first sees Billy, he’s with a woman who had what was definitely the one of the most ridiculous names that I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Her name was…wait for it…Evay. Yeah, what kind of name is Evay? That’s such a weird name, and while she wasn’t the book beyond the part where Billy first sees Kate at her mom’s diner, I got the impression that she wasn’t someone who simply had a weird name, she was just a weird person in general. After all, she told Kate that she didn’t want to order any food, because she was simply going to take some pills for her lunch instead.
During the period of time that Kate was staying with her mom, she continued to spend some time with Billy, while also contemplating whether or not she wanted to keep the baby since her relationship with Drew was over as far as she was concerned. Kate told Billy about the baby and they shared a kiss, but nothing really happened between them beyond that. Just as Kate had come to the conclusion that she didn’t want to have an abortion and that she would keep the baby, she started hemorrhaging blood leading her to believe that she was having a miscarriage. The emergency room doctor even told her that she had suffered a miscarriage.
However, when she went to the doctor to have a D&C procedure done, the doctor discovered that she hadn’t had a miscarriage after all, she had simply been experiencing some spotting, which the doctor told her can happen during the first trimester of a pregnancy and that the reason the emergency room doctor hadn’t been able to find the baby’s heartbeat was because it can sometimes be difficult to find a baby’s heartbeat at that point in the pregnancy. After learning that she hadn’t had a miscarriage after all, Kate was worried that she might have hurt the baby by smoking pot after she had believed that she had miscarried, but the doctor assured her that the baby should probably be fine since she had only smoked pot that one time. I’m not sure that’s what a doctor would tell a woman who had smoked pot just one time during her pregnancy in real life and that honestly seemed a little weird to me, but that’s what the doctor told Kate.
Personally, I thought that the whole thing with Kate not suffering a miscarriage after all was somewhat predictable since I already knew from reading the reviews for the other books in the Tangled series that follow this book that Drew and Kate had already had a kid before they got married. If Kate had actually had a miscarriage in this book, the only way around the whole thing with Drew and Kate already having a kid by the time they get married would be for Kate to get pregnant again, and conceiving two children out of wedlock would be way too “How I Met Your Mother” for my taste, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that Drew is thankfully no Ted Mosby. Plus, I definitely don’t want to think about the colossal train wreck that was How I Met Your Mother’s series finale if I can help it.
This book definitely has a lot of flaws, but if I had to say what I think is the biggest flaw that Twisted has, it would be that Emma Chase broke the whole “show, don’t tell” rule of writing way too much, especially when it comes to Drew’s actions throughout the book. After Kate goes to stay with her mom and she finally got out of bed, she discovered that she got a bunch of messages from Alexandra telling Kate that Drew is practically self-destructing because he thinks that Kate had been cheating on him, but we as the reader never really get to see for ourselves how horribly Drew is handling the whole situation. We’re simply told that Drew is essentially self-destructing. The closest we get to seeing how horribly Drew is doing is when he shows up unexpectedly at the diner where Kate’s mom works and desperately begs Kate to take him back.
One thing that really surprised me about the book was the fact that the whole misunderstanding between Kate and Drew was straightened out and they reconciled a lot earlier in the book than I was expecting, but not before another long drawn out conversation involving one vague statement after the other that were all pretty much oozing with double meaning before they finally ended up on the same page. Kate tells Drew about the baby, and Drew tells Kate that he never slept with the stripper, mainly because he couldn’t get an erection. Given the fact that at times I felt like Drew got erections more often in Tangled than Ana blushes in Fifty Shades of Grey, I found that rather surprising.
The fact that Kate and Drew got back together about two thirds of the way into the book is something that I really liked about Twisted, because I think it was great way to break away from the clichés that are all too common when it comes to romance novels and romantic comedies. Usually, this kind of story ends with the guy and the girl either reconciling or getting together if they weren’t already a couple to begin with. While I love romance novels and romantic comedies, and I consider myself a bit of a hopeless romantic, I do have more than two functioning brain cells, so even I can realize how silly and stupid the endings of romantic comedies can be at times. For example, if the girl quits her job and decides to move somewhere else to pursue other career options and get away from the guy, only to have the guy show up unexpectedly and win the girl back, the fact that the girl is now most likely unemployed gets completely thrown to the wayside as the movie ends with the couple being all happy and in love, which I think is definitely pretty stupid. I know that’s pretty much the case with the movie How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and I’m saying that as someone who loves that movie.
Honestly, the older I get the more I wonder if in the case of a movie like that if there’s any part of the character that’s going to think about the foolishness of quitting one job so they can move somewhere else to get away from the other person and most likely to also take another job. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with wanting to get a fresh start. Personally, I think it only becomes a truly foolish move when they impulsively change their mind about taking the new job in order to get back together with the guy. A part of me has always wanted to know if they are just thinking: Yeah…I don’t have a job any more, but who cares about being financially secure? I’ve got the guy of my dreams!
The cynical part of me would love to see what happens after the guy and the girl finally get together at the end of a romantic comedy and the person realizes that they’ve essentially sabotaged their own career all for the sake of love and are freaking out about what they’re going to do next. The fact that romantic comedies pretty much never show the aftermath of a couple getting together and that kind of realism is something that Kate talks to the reader about once Kate and Drew get the massive miscommunication between them sorted out. They go to the diner where Kate’s mom works, all happy and love, and despite Kate explaining Drew’s side of the whole fiasco, Kate’s mom isn’t willing welcome Drew back with open arms and it ends up taking a little while longer for her to forgive Drew for what he did.
I love that one of the people in the diner told Kate and Drew that they needed “buckets of therapy”, because that’s pretty much exactly what I had been thinking for almost the entire book. They clearly have a lot of issues with communication if you take their actions in both Tangled and Twisted into consideration. The fact that the main conflict in this book as well as some of the conflict in Tangled stemmed from a relatively simple misunderstanding makes me think that Drew and Kate might not have the communication skills to make their relationship last a lifetime.
I also have to wonder if Drew doesn’t also have some serious trust issues when I think about how quickly and how easily he apparently came to the conclusion that Kate was having an affair. Sure, she did lie to him about where she was going when she was really going to see her doctor in order to find out whether or she really was pregnant, but they’ve been together for two years at that point. After being together for two years, I really would hope that Drew would be able to trust Kate enough to not be so quick to assume that she was having an affair. That aspect of the book didn’t make their relationship seem like it was on very solid ground, and yet the way Kate was talking to the reader about their relationship, things seemed to be going very well between them, and they seemed very happy together at the start of the book.
Since Drew did catch Kate in a lie, I think he should have calmly and simply confronted her about her lying to him about where she was instead of bringing home a random stripper, getting drunk and making out with the stripper until Kate got home. By switching between Kate and Drew’s point of view, the reader would have been able to see how he came to that conclusion, and they would have also been able to see how horribly Drew was handling the whole situation instead of simply hearing about it when people left messages for Kate on her voicemail.
The epilogue, which was told from Drew’s point of view, jumped ahead towards the point in time when Kate was going to be giving birth soon. Kate was still living in her own place at that point, but she and Drew were still spending a lot of time together, and she did tell Drew that she wanted to move back in with him, but she wanted them to get a brand new place that could be truly theirs. Drew was also making plans to propose to Kate in the near future, having established that he didn’t want to propose to Kate while she was still pregnant. The reason for this being that he didn’t want her to think he was only proposing to her because she was having his baby. Drew made it very clear in his own unique way to the reader that he was incredibly attracted to Kate now that she was pregnant, mainly due to the pregnancy hormones making her breast huge. Yeah…Drew sure is a charmer.
They ended up having sex when he took her home to her place, and Kate went into labor soon after they were done having sex. Kate ended up giving birth to a baby boy, which they named James Brooks-Evans, and I have to say that I think that’s a very nice name.
While I did enjoy reading a book that was primarily from Kate’s point of view, I definitely love Drew as a narrator and protagonist for a book more than I liked reading a story told from Kate’s point of view. Personally, I thought that the way Kate was written in this book felt somewhat out of character compared to how she was written in Tangled. Maybe I’m forgetting things from Tangled, but the whole thing with Kate apparently having a history of drinking a lot, getting drunk and smoking pot when she was younger didn’t really fit with how I came to view Kate as a character by the end of Tangled one bit. When I was reading Tangled, I came to view Kate as being someone who had a certain amount innocence when it came to sex and romance without being incredibly naïve and stupid like Ana from Fifty Shades of Grey is, mainly due to only having dated Billy up to that point in her life. When I was reading this book, I felt like Emma Chase was trying to portray Kate as being somewhat of a rebellious bad girl, so I was definitely rather thrown by Kate’s behavior at times. Plus, I just didn’t think she was as interesting as Drew is in terms of the two of them being the protagonist of a book.
However, when I was reading this book there were times where I wondered if Emma Chase would have rather written Twisted from Drew’s point of view for the most part, but for some reason somebody told her that this book had to be written from Kate’s point of view, so she compromised by inserting Drew-like traits into Kate and decided to write the epilogue from Drew’s point of view. If I wanted to be generous and try to come up with a possible explanation for Kate acting a lot like Drew in this book, I suppose you could say that living with Drew for the past two years had caused some of his personality traits to rub off on Kate. However, I’m not sure that makes complete sense given what Kate tells the reader about her high school years and her life before she met Drew. Regardless of what the actual reason for Kate being written so differently in this book, I definitely think that when it comes to the writing for a TV show or a book series, it’s never a good thing to have characters be written in an inconsistent manner.
As much as I enjoyed the epilogue and having it be written from Drew’s point of view like Tangled was, I still thought that it was a little disappointing just like the rest of the book. Unlike the ending of Tangled, Drew telling the reader what he’s learned from everything that happened between him and Kate and the emotional pain and anguish that he apparently experienced throughout the events of this book really felt rather hollow to me. After all, we didn’t get to see it for ourselves the pain and anguish Drew felt after Kate left him that caused him to learn those things. We were simply told about it through a few quick messages on Kate’s voicemail, which caused that aspect of the epilogue to not have a huge emotional impact. The most we got to see of Drew’s anguish was when he showed up at the diner where Kate’s mom works and begged Kate to take him back, saying that he was willing to have an open relationship if that’s what she wanted, as long as he was able to be with her before the massive misunderstanding was FINALLY cleared up and Kate told him that she was pregnant.
Drew also told the reader that he’s started going to church a lot since he hadn’t been able to get an erection, which I think is one of the most bizarre reasons why a man would turn to God. I think a person struggling with his or her sex life would be a rather bizarre reason for anyone to turn to religion, man or woman. Although, being a Christian myself, I don’t think God would care what person’s reasons for turning to Him and choosing to believe in Him were. I think He would just be happy that they made that decision, but I digress.
Since I’m also currently reading Fifty Shades of Grey and I think Ana is a complete and total doormat, I really appreciated Kate coming across as a strong and independent person in both Tangled and this book. It was also great to see Kate actually demonstrate those qualities throughout the book instead of constantly telling the reader that she’s a strong-willed and independent woman, only to immediately do something that she’s already told the reader she doesn’t want to do simply because someone tells her to do it like Ana does in Fifty Shades of Grey. That really allowed me to respect Kate, especially when Kate tells Drew that she wants to get her own place for a while because she’s never lived on her own before. Although, for the record a small part of me thought that she should continue to live with Drew since she was pregnant so he could support and help her throughout her pregnancy. However, it sounds like they did spend a fair amount of time together throughout the remainder of her pregnancy.
All things considered, while I did enjoy this book, it was definitely a rather disappointing follow-up to Tangled that really made me question whether or not I should even be rooting for Kate and Drew’s relationship to work out like I did when I was reading Tangled. I know that I’ve already said this a bunch of times, but I really do think the book would have benefitted from alternating between Kate’s point of view and Drew’s point of view. It would have probably caused what I as the reader knew about Drew taking the breakup so hard and some of the things that Drew says to the reader in the epilogue about everything that he’s apparently learned from the whole experience to carry more emotional weight. If Emma Chase had fleshed out that aspect of the book A LOT more instead of the reader simply being told about all of that without seeing the journey that Drew went through to come to that conclusion, I would be much more likely to believe that Drew had actually learned something from the experience. Instead, we, the reader, basically have to “just go with it”. Plus, I think the book would have been a lot more interesting if it had been written that way.
As I said earlier, some of the writing for Kate in this book didn’t feel very consistent with how she was written and portrayed in Tangled, and that was definitely the other major flaw that this book had. When it comes to characters in a book series, it’s never a good thing to have the way a character is written be inconsistent from one book to the next, and I’d say that’s definitely the case with this book, which really diminished my overall enjoyment of Twisted quite a bit.
The next book that I’m planning to read and review is the third book in the Tangled series, Tamed. Tamed is written from the point of Drew’s best friend, Matthew Fisher, and I for one am hoping that it will prove to be a major improvement over this book.
That being said, my final score for Twisted is 4 out of 10.
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