Saturday, May 25, 2013

Review: Tiger's Quest by Colleen Houck


Tiger's Quest by Colleen Houck
Series: The Tiger Saga #2
Publication date: June 7th, 2011
Pages: 479

Synopsis (according to Goodreads):
Back in Oregon, Kelsey tries to pick up the pieces of her life and push aside her feelings for Ren. Kelsey Hayes's eighteenth summer was crazy. The kind of crazy nobody would ever believe.

Aside from battling immortal sea monkeys and trekking the jungles of India, she fell in love with Ren, a 300-year-old prince.

When danger suddenly forces Kelsey on another Indian quest, with Ren's bad-boy brother, Kishan, the unlikely duo begins to question their true destiny. Ren's life hangs in the balance--so does the truth within Kelsey's heart.

Tiger's Quest, the thrilling second volume in the Tiger's Curse series, brings the trio one step closer to breaking the ancient prophecy that binds them.


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Review:
As seen in my review of the first book Tiger's Curse, I was not a fan of this series or the characters within it. I found Kelsey to be incredibly annoying and her constant damsel in distress routine to be tiresome. the only thing that kept me powering through the book was Ren and his brother, Kishan. If they had been as irritating as Kelsey, I would have had to write the entire series off as a loss and never find out what happened to the Tiger princes.

What a loss that would have been. I came into Tiger's Quest with a teeth grit and a "just do it and get it over with" attitude. That quickly changed as I became engrossed in the story. I started to find Kelsey less and less of a burden and found Kishan, who was the main male protagonist in this volume of the series, to be utterly swoon-worthy. I found myself flipping back to the cover of the book to make sure I was really reading the second installment of the series.

Colleen Houck totally changed how I felt about Kelsey. She made her start learning to fight and gave her cool new powers thanks to the goddess, Durga. She seamlessly turned Kelsey from a bumbling idiot in need of saving all the time, into the type of kick ass female lead I am accustomed to. Granted, she still blubbers about her love for Ren and the complication of growing feelings for Kishan, but I was able to overlook that since she didn't seem like such an infant anymore. She was even able to save the boys a time or two instead of depending on them to do the saving all the time.

Kelsey wasn't the only one that changed. In the first book, Kishan was the secondary character with nothing going for him except good looks and a smug attitude. The second book delved deeper into Kishan since Ren was taken out of the equation fairly early in the book. I loved getting to see a new side of Kishan. Yes, he was still smug and yes, he still had that air of a bad-boy, but there was more emotion than that beneath the surface. Kishan, as he put it, is a "man of action". He wants Kelsey and he is going to pursue her whether she wants him to or not. I like possessive, can-do attitudes in men, so of course, I fell head-over-heels for Kishan even if Kelsey tried to deny she did the same.

Between Kelsey's growth and the deeper look into Kishan, this book completely made up for the rocky start of the first book. I found myself immediately searching for the third book in the series so I could find out what happened next. That wasn't the case after the first book by any stretch of the imagination. I have a feeling that love triangle is going to become more and more interesting as time goes by, let's just hope Kelsey doesn't sob too profusely or slip into mental breakdown after mental breakdown. Her depression depresses me. Colleen please don't torment me with "whiny little girl" Kelsey again. Pretty please?