Tag: Tangle of Need (Psy-Changeling #11) by Nalini Singh

Kiss of Snow and Tangle of Need by Nalini Singh Review

 

Kiss of Snow                              Tangle of Need

So I read these back to back which is why I couldn’t write a review for Kiss Of Snow (which was what I had planned initially) I finished KOS and then I planned to wait a little before I started Tangle of Need but sadly that didn’t work. The two books are very closely related; in fact you might even regard TON as a platform to set up the coming Psy war.

In KOS we finally got the pair we had all been dying to read about: Hawke and Sienna. And it lived up to my ridiculously high expectations and then some. I expected there to be a lot of sexual tension and a healthy amount of verbal back and forth. Plus there was also more than a healthy dose of nail biting suspense that carried over to TON. In KOS, the Pure Psy finally threw down the gauntlet and tried to take down SnowDancer and also hobble the city of San Fransico: which is now considered the stronghold of 2 Psy councillors: Nikita and Anthony. Both of whom reject the tenets of the Pure Psy. Henry targets them thinking to make an example of them and also gain their city. He targeted the changelings because he viewed them as an inferior species and therefore undeserving of the power they had accumulated. Its difficult to review one without the other because they are so close in terms of the events covered and the consequences of those events. In TON, we got Adria and Riaz’s love story. But unlike KOS, where the main driving force of the novel was their romance, TON focused on a lot of other events and also a host of other characters. Most of whom we met earlier in the series and it was nice to revisit those characters again. In TON, the Pure Psy seem to have shifted their gaze from the changelings to the PsyNet, but that’s not all. Someone seems to be spying on the SnowDancers and it is unclear who it might be. But not for long. What I like best about Nalini Singh, she is not sadistic, that is, she doesn’t draw out the story unnecessarily simply to make the suspense more intense. It’s a cheap tactic. Anyway, so through the course of these two books, a lot of questions are answered (along with the possible identity of the Ghost) and we learn more the characters we’ve come to love and care about.

First off, Hawke and Sienna. I knew they were gonna end up together regardless of all those subtle hints thrown by Ms Singh that Sienna was seeing Kit and so on. It was obvious from the way Sienna got under Hawke’s cool exterior. And it was also a lot of fun. Hawke is so in control, it was sometimes maddening. I don’t think we ever saw him lose his cool in any of the previous books and that he so easily lost it with Sienna was both amusing and also a little sad because it wasn’t fair to her. But worry not, all that snarling aside, she was not deterred. She knew she wanted Hawke and she pursued him with a single-minded focus that would’ve made any changeling proud. Plus she had help from very unlikely people (a DarkRiver future alpha might’ve been one of them) Though only nineteen in the book, Sienna’s relationship Hawke, is never awkward or uncomfortable. I thought it would be since Hawke is about thirty-eight or thereabouts, but Sienna is written as an older character and it makes sense when you consider the horrors she’s seen and lived through. She is not your average nineteen year old, in fact, she has never truly been a child so while in terms of age she may have been very young for Hawke, that difference was inconsequential in all the ways it really mattered. They were good for each other because Hawke was so used to getting his way and what he wanted that he needed to be challenged by someone who was not impressed by him throwing around his dominance. While he had had a happy childhood before it was destroyed by bloodshed, she hadn’t had any. She could depend on no one, trust no one. And she still managed to make it out of the Net, perhaps not unscathed but definitely with an iron will not just to survive but to truly live. These circumstances made her a whole lot older, mentally and emotionally than others her own age. It also gave her a maturity lacking in her peers for the simple reason that they had not lived under the circumstances that she had. So who better than Sienna to challenge Hawke’s dominance and to make him see her for the strong person she is.

There was another, sweet pairing that we’re treated to KOS. There were stirrings of it in Play of Passion and if you paid careful attention, you’d have figured out who I’m talking about.

Next up, Adria and Riaz. We first met them in Play of Passion and are given a very brief insight into their lives. Riaz finally found his mate only to find that she’s someone else’s wife and very much in love with him (it reminded me of that Alanis Morrisette song, Ironic. It has that line: meeting the man of my dreams and meeting his beautiful wife. Similar but reversed gender J) Adria, for the longest time, was in a relationship with someone less dominant than her. And while, initially, they were very much in love, that relationship eventually very toxic and deeply hurt her. So when Adria and Riaz meet, there is a definite pull toward each other, but they are both so haunted by their own respective pasts, they can’t see beyond that. But soon that pull becomes so intense that they give in. What starts as simple and no-strings-attached ‘skin privileges’ soon turns into something more complicated. There is (again) quite a bit of back and forth resulting from their insecurities and demons that there was a chance that it could have become tedious, but thankfully it did not. This was, in a large part, due to all the other character threads present in Tangle of Need. We got to catch up on what had been going on with the other characters in the Psy-Changeling universe. To say this was a dedicated Adria-Riaz book would be a bit of stretch since it concentrated on a lot of other characters. And it also served in a large capacity as a precursor to the Psy conflict going all out crazy.

They were both great books in an extremely amazing series. How Nalini Singh can keep this up, book after book is beyond me but she is definitely one of my favourite adult fiction authors. Well written, superbly developed characters are trade marks of her books. If you are wondering if you should read this series, then the answer is a resounding YES! If on the other hand you are wondering if you should continue reading the series, you definitely should because this series is only getting better and the stakes are rising steadily higher.

Do you guys think there’s any chance there we might get an excerpt or teaser for Archangel’s Legion in Heart of Obsidian? I’m hoping we do. J