RSS Add-Me
Tangled up in You by Rachel Gibson
  | Tangled up in You Rachel Gibson Date: 2007-8-01 — 6.99 — Book Rating: C+
|
Tangled up in You is the latest in Gibson's author friends series. I have been tepid about this series so far. This one was going to be a library read, but then I read a few online reviews and decided I had to buy it. Having finished it, I'd rank it on par with the first, Sex, Lies, and Online Dating - a C+. I'm in No Mood for Love, the second book, was a straight C for me.
Maddie Jones writes about death for a living. As Madeline Dupree, she interviews serial killers and other murderers and has had success as a true crime writer. She isn't afraid of anything. But her newest project, investigating the twenty-nine-year-old murder-suicide that caused her mother's death and disrupted her childhood, has her outside of her comfort zone. She has moved back to Truly, Idaho, the last place she and her mother lived together, to gather information from whomever might remember Alice Jones and how she died. Maddie knows that she will come into contact with Mick and Meg Hennessy, who were also orphaned by the crime. She knows that her project will upset them, but she doesn't anticipate how much Mick Hennessy will upset her - emotionally and sexually.
Mick Hennessy has only recently returned to Truly himself. After a lengthy stint in the military, he came back to run his family's bar and to offer support to his sister whom he feels may have some of the emotional instability that characterized his mother. His mother killed Alice Jones and her husband before turning her gun on herself, and that act of violence changed his whole childhood and made him and his sister objects of notoriety in town. However, Mick isn't one to wallow in the past. He's moved on, gotten beyond it. Or that's what he thinks...until a sexy writer moves into town and begins digging up the dirt that time finally buried.
Story-wise, Tangled up in You bears a great resemblance to Gibson's See Jane Score. The sexually experienced but cynical female writer gets involved against her "will" and better judgment with a ultra hot man of some reputation. In the way of their relationship is something literally of her making: something she is writing about him. Spoilers follow (highlight to read): This piece of writing morphs from a project to a Big Secret after they become intimate and remains problematic until it is revealed, rather dramatically, at which point he decides he doesn't want anything to do with a woman who could betray him so. I do not believe this is not oversimplification. This book's been done before and better.
Rachel Gibson writes two things well: funny and hot. This book is definitely hot. There are numerous sexually charged love scenes. But, unfortunately, it's not really that funny. In her most successfully humorous books, the humor comes from the juxtaposition of exaggerated masculinity with feminine kitsch. It's funny to see an outrageously macho guy forced to play Barbies with his little girly girl daughter. It's funny to watch a fashion-challenged heroine have to confront the Sex God of Hockey in her cow pajamas. The more overblown the machismo, the more chance of it looking ridiculous next to the trappings of real life. But while Mick Hennessy is certainly masculine, he's just a hot small-town bar owner. Not much to play up there. He isn't an alpha jerk like Nick Allegrezzo and there's no history of previous conflict between Maddie and him for Gibson to work with. There isn't even a power imbalance between them to create tension. They are more or less equal: equally uninteresting.
Because in the end, the reader finds out very little about Mick or Maddie. It doesn't help that the story's backstory, the murder-suicide Maddie is writing about, is potentially much more interesting than the romance of Maddie and Mick. Interesting characters, however, could eventually overshadow a story of marital dysfunction. But the reader finds out much more about what Maddie and Mick look like than what they are like. Why does Maddie write about serial killers and sociopaths? Who knows? Why does Mick feel a need to continue in the tradition of his male forbears in the bar business? Unexplained. What does either of them feel about anything except their mutual attraction? We don't find out. They have straightforward romance-novel-type relationships with their siblings and friends, the only exception of which is Mick's relationship with his sister whose stability concerns him. Both of them seem fairly egocentric. Neither of them appear to have the sort of moral or religious compass that will help sustain the relationship when the sex gets less explosive.
Gibson has never been strong with the "sweeter" elements of romance. Her books aren't throat-clogging, tear-jerkers. Her characters don't usually have to sacrifice life and limb for their loved ones. It's this quality that makes me ask myself, whenever I finish one of her books, "What is going to keep these two together? What is it that they need from each other that someone else can't give?" I've been coming up empty on those questions for some time now, and Tangled up in You is the same.
If you want to read vintage, emotionally satisfying Gibson, I'd skip this one and re-read Simply Irresistible or Truly, Madly Yours.