Twisted: Reading this book makes me wonder if therapists should offer gift certificates for couples therapy (My thoughts on Book #2 in the Tangled book series by Emma Chase)

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.

Tangled: Forget Fifty Shades of Grey. If you’re looking for a great steamy romance novel, read this book instead. (My thoughts on Book #1 in the Tangled book series by Emma Chase)

For the past several months I’ve been debating whether or not I should start reviewing books for my blog, and I’ve spent a lot of time in bookstores looking at various books to possibly review. Once I found several books that I’m interested in reading, Tangled by Emma Chase being one of them, I asked people both here on my main blog and on several of my Tumblr pages for their input, and I ultimately decided to read Tangled for my first foray into reviewing books on a potentially semi-regular, if not regular, basis after several people suggested that I read this book.

One thing that’s extremely important to note about Tangled is that the story for the most part has a rather nonlinear structure, and the book is written in the first person point of view with Drew basically telling us the story of how he fell in love Kate Brooks, a woman who also works at his dad’s investment banking firm. Also, I didn’t technically read the book; I listened to the audiobook version of it, which was flawlessly read by Sebastian York. This brings me to one of the few complaints that have about the book. While I ultimately came to view the nonlinear manner in which Drew tells the reader his story to be one of greatest strengths of the book, I was a little annoyed with it at the start of the book.

When I first started listening to the book on my iPod, I found the way Chase jumped around from Drew lying in bed lamenting to the people reading the book about the fact that he had the flu and had been in bed for a week, but how he didn’t really have the flu, to talking about what events led to him being in bed with the flu rather discombobulating at first, which prompted me to listen to several different parts of the beginning of the book a second time. Drew telling the reader that he had “the flu” was basically his way of saying that he had been stuck in bed, hung up on Kate and the fact that he at the time believed that she had chosen to be with her high school sweetheart, Billy, who she was engaged to for a significant part of the book. Personally, if I were Emma Chase, I would have held off on jumping back and forth between the past and the present just a little bit longer than she did, simply so the reader can have the chance to get somewhat acclimated with the character Drew and what was going on with him at the start of the book.

However, the nonlinear nature of the book ultimately proves to be one of the greatest strengths of the book, if you ask me. Since Tangled is essentially Drew telling the reader the story of how he fell in love with Kate and won her heart, it makes a lot of sense to me that he would jump around a little bit as he’s telling the story. The way the book is written feels very true and natural to how a person would verbally tell someone a story in real life. After all, if a person is telling someone a story verbally in real life, the odds are that they won’t necessarily mention every person who’s involved in the story and every little detail they feel their audience needs to know in a sequential order. Maybe they might think you need to know about other people and details of story before they talk about a part of the story so that you’ll have a better understanding of the story as a whole. The other reason I think people do this is that a person’s memory isn’t perfect, so they aren’t necessarily going to be immediately reminded of something or someone, and for whatever reason they won’t mention it until a certain point where they have to backtrack in telling their story.