Tiger’s Quest, the second installment of Colleen Houck’s series about brother tigers and a special girl, brings even more adventure than the first one. Rating: 3.5/5

*This is book #6/35 for my 2015 book challenge. You can take a look at the reading challenge here.

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.

I had a lot of mixed feelings with this one. Most of my negative feelings about the first book, Tiger’s Curse, carried themselves over to Tiger’s Quest. I feel like Kelsey is not only unrelatable, but also incredibly lame. She is the one true downfall of this series, and it is really unfortunate. The entire beginning was pretty much unbearable between her whining and pining and then strange dating situations. Which, speaking of, I’m real sick of main female characters in young adult books being COMPLETELY SHOCKED AND UNBELIEVING of any member of the male species being interested in them romantically or sexually. I understand that authors are doing this because they think this makes their characters relatable and that they believe having a character be comfortable and perhaps even confident in her appearance would be awful to read about. They’re wrong. In fact, I feel like they should continue writing “plain jane” characters (though even that is a touchy subject for me) and have them be at least SLIGHTLY comfortable in their own skin as a means of inspiration but that’s something for another day.

AS I WAS SAYING. Kelsey has all of these guys fawning all over her and tripping over their own feet to get even a moment alone with her and yet it CANNOT BE because she is KELSEY HAYES and how could anyone want to be with her?!?!??!!

Kishan (brother of Ren, Kelsey’s boyfriend) is also in love with Kelsey which, hi, how predictable? While the existence of a love triangle is sigh-worthy enough, it triggered all my feminist red flags and made me actually rage at one point. We know that Kelsey is fighting feelings because we’re living inside her head, but Kishan doesn’t know this. He can suspect, of course. But his suspicions and own selfishness started to border on sexual assault. Seriously. He keeps kissing her without her consent and then laughs it off despite the fact that she keeps telling him that she isn’t interested in him like that and that he needs to stop kissing her. Society is holding 50 Shades of Grey up as an awful creation that romanticizes abusive relationships while this kind of situation between Kishan and Kelsey happens in more young adult books than I can think of. It is romanticized and glamorized as so wonderful and loving that the boy just doesn’t give up and the girl has to choose between two amazing lovely men and just ughhhhhh. It bothers me. Even if I was “catching feelings” as the young kids these days would say, if someone ever continually forced themselves on me (ESPECIALLY if I was confused!!!!!!) that person would no longer be an option in my mind.

With all that said, there are still aspects of the series that are good enough to keep me wanting to continue reading. I still love the amount of detail Colleen Houck puts in about the culture and setting the scene. While some parts have me drifting off, I appreciate how she is crafting her world. You still have a suspension of disbelief because of magic and other weirdness, but it’s enjoyable. There was quite a twist at the end of the book (albeit a predictable one) and I’m looking forward to seeing where the characters and their journey go to next.

Rating:

If you’re interested in reading my GoodReads updates from this book you can do so here. I must say, they’re quite entertaining. It will tell you exactly what I was thinking on certain pages.

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