Tangled Up in Love
Grade : C

Tangled Up in Love is the first book in a trilogy about women who knit, amusingly titled “Chicks with Sticks.” While in general this story was enjoyable, there was a major plot point that I disagreed with that prevents me from recommending it.

Veronica (Ronnie) Chasen and Dylan Stone are rival columnists at two different Cleveland newspapers. Their rivalry began when Dylan beat Ronnie out of the prime columnist position at the larger Cleveland Herald, prompting Ronnie to proclaim that it was because she’s a woman and Dylan to fire back that men are just naturally better at some things. For a year now they’ve been publicly sending each other on extreme challenges to see who’ll cave first.

Ronnie is stumped about what to challenge Dylan to next, when she hits upon the idea of a knitting challenge. It will be the tamest challenge yet, but likely the most difficult for Dylan to accomplish. He has one month to learn how to knit and produce some knitted item to prove his skills. Dylan thinks it’ll be a piece of cake at first, but after spending the weekend trying to interpret Knitting for Dummies and failing miserably, he’s now very concerned. He learns about a weekly knitting group at a local yarn store and decides to pay someone to teach him one-on-one.

Of course Ronnie and her friends make up the weekly knitting circle that Dylan wants to join, and she’s adamantly opposed to providing her archenemy with any sort of assistance. One of Ronnie’s friends, however, has a different idea and she pushes Ronnie to help Dylan. Dylan is very attracted to Ronnie, and decides that instead of fighting his attraction to her, he’ll kill two birds with one stone by paying her for knitting lessons, thereby getting some alone time with her. Ronnie finally agrees to teach Dylan, although secretly she knows she’s only giving him very rudimentary instruction because she still doesn’t want him to win the challenge.

I liked Ronnie’s character, although she has some issues, and enjoyed the professional rivalry between her and Dylan. I also liked that Dylan wasn’t the chauvinist pig that reading his column would lead one to believe — really, he’s just says the things he does to rile Ronnie. Dylan’s attraction to Ronnie is clear from the beginning, but I wasn’t really feeling it on Ronnie’s end. It felt more like I was being told she was really attracted to him, rather than feeling that attraction. That said, there was chemistry between the characters and the sex scenes were pretty hot.

Unfortunately, my like for Dylan (and the book) took a serious nosedive when he takes advantage of a situation in a way that was not only very un-heroic, but caused me to lose nearly all respect for him and a secondary character who was involved. It occurred a tad too far into the story for me to go into detail, but left me so angry that had I not been reading the book for review I wouldn’t have finished it. However, while it’s certainly a plot point that I disagreed with, it’s also something that won’t bother every reader. The book was in the D range at this point based on this episode, but as I continued reading it slowly made its way up to the C range. A lot of this is because, after the initial conflict following this incident, it wasn’t ever mentioned or thought of again and I was able to mostly pretend it didn’t happen. When the heroine forgives and forgets, it’s difficult for me to stay mad.

Basically this is a light, fast-paced story with a fun premise. The only thing that bugged me about the writing style was that it had too much detail. Oftentimes the author would write out every little thing a character did when he was performing some minor action, and I found myself frequently skipping sentences just to get on with whatever was happening.

While Tangled Up in Love was, on the whole, entertaining, I found that I just couldn’t recommend it due to my distaste over the aforementioned incident. Some readers will agree with me, and others won’t mind; you’ll have to decide if you want to take the chance. Unfortunately for me, my dislike of the hero’s actions in this book will likely prevent me from reading the next book in the series.

Reviewed by Katie Mack
Grade : C

Sensuality: Hot

Review Date : March 21, 2009

Publication Date: 2009

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