Tangled Up In You

 

Tangled Up In You- Christina Lauren

Hyperion Ave

Release Date: June 25, 2024

Rated: 📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: She has a dream. He has a plan. Together they’ll take a leap of faith. 

Ren has never held an iPhone, googled the answer to a question, or followed a crush on social media. What she has done: Read a book or two, or three (okay, hundreds). Taught herself to paint. Built a working wind power system from scratch. But for all the books she’s read, Ren has never found one that’s taught a woman raised on a homestead and off the grid for most of her twenty-two years how to live in the real world. So when she finally achieves her lifelong dream of attending Corona College, it feels like her life is finally beginning. 

Fitz has the rest of his life mapped out: Graduate from Corona at the top of his class, get his criminal record wiped clean, and pass himself off as the rich, handsome player everyone thinks he is. He’s a few short months from checking off step one of his plans when Ren Gylden, with her cascading blonde hair and encyclopedic brain, crashes into his life, and for the first time Fitz’s plan is in jeopardy. 

But a simple assignment in their immunology seminar changes the course of both their lives, and suddenly they’re thrown out of the frying pan and into the fire on a road trip that will lead them in the most unexpected directions. Out on the open road, the world somehow shifts, and the unlikely pair realize that, maybe, the key to the dreams they've both been chasing have been sitting next to them the whole time.

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In a departure from their normal books, Christina Lauren does Tangled Up In You, a contemporary riff on Disney's Tangled, a retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale. Here Ren is a 22 year-old going to college for the first time. She's lived off the grid her whole life, her parents always keeping her on the farm and isolated from the big, bad world with its evil influences. But they relucantly allow college when Ren gets a full scholarship and Ren's horizons start expanding. She's brilliant but naive, friendly, outgoing, impulsive- kind of like a golden retriever puppy. She wants to experience all college life has to offer, so when her immunology professor gives the class the option to take a DNA test, she does- even knowing her parents wouldn't approve. When it comes back with a match, she has questions and knows her parents won't answer them. So she convinces Fitz to drive her to Atlanta so she can get the answers she needs.

Fitz took a little warming up to, mostly because you know from nearly the start that he isn't who he pretends to be, but you can't quite figure him out. On the road trip I really started to like him because despite how annoying Ren could be, he really started to get why she was the way she was and he couldn't bring himself to deny her the full road trip experience. It was kind of cute watching him try to figure out how to deal with the changing feelings he had over the course of the trip, and his total confusion.

The book is a slower pace than most of Christina Lauren's books, sometimes almost too slow, until the very end when everythig speeds up to the conclusion. There's almost no spicy scenes in the book, Fitz and Ren fall for each other slowly and sweetly. Readers will probably see the twists for the ending coming even if they haven't seen Tangled (have to admit, I haven't) and I thought it was handled very well. 

Regular fans will find this one a change from their normal books, but give it a try. Slow for large parts but I thought the feels at the end paid off. And the grumpy/sunshine vibes through the whole book are delightful

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review