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alexiscartwheelSuper short review of The Tiger's Curse: it sucks.
No, seriously. It's an awful bunch of awfulness topped in awfulsauce. I liked it less than The Eternal Ones because at least it had unintentional hilarity and a sassy gay friend. The Tiger's Curse is bad and boring at the same time.
Here's the description on the back: "In this gripping YA fantasy, a sultry Indian prince is cursed to spend eternity as a tiger—until he meets the plucky American teenage girl destine to free him."
You know that thing Aristotle said about probable impossibilities being better than possible improbabilities? That's pretty much everything that's wrong with this book. (Okay, I lie. It's everything except the really bad writing.) I can buy the prince turned into a tiger who lives for hundreds of years part. That's just magic!
What I can't buy is the rest of the plot. Kelsey, our heroine is 17 and lives with foster parents. She gets a 2 week temp job at a circus (what?) taking care of the tiger (what?). She reads it poetry and can tell from it's eyes that it enjoys it. Then a mysterious man comes to the circus to buy the tiger, and he wants to hire Kelsey to transport the tiger to India (what?). Her foster parents are okay with this, which makes me question their fitness to care for children.
Once they're in India, Kelsey discovers that Dihren is really a prince, but even those he's trapped in tiger form, he gets exactly 24 minutes a day as a man (so that they can fall in luuuurve). There's destiny and stuff involved, fo course. For reasons unknown, Kelsey is the chosen one of an Indian goddess who's going to help Dihren, who she nicknames "Ren" almost immediately, become a man again, hopefully a cute one. They have some quest stuff to do, which is mostly boring. They go camping a lot and Kelsey describes every single meal she eats. Lots of power bars. That she also feeds to the tiger, because tigers love power bars, didn't you know?
The best thing about this book? The scene where they were getting chased by monkeys and I had to backtrack a page to figure out where the hell the monkeys came from. (They were statues come to life!)
If you're not convinced yet of how much you do NOT want to read this book, here are two of my frustrated tweets that capture the reading experience. There's some other stuff about a brother and an arranged marriage to some hot girl with violet eyes, but who cares?
There are sequels in the works, of course. By the end of the book Kelsey and Ren haven't completed all the tasks, though Ren is up to six whole hours as a man each day. Kelsey, meanwhile, has decided they can't be together because she's a boring old normal girl and he's a prince, so even though they're in love, he'll eventually find someone better. And those love triangle early warning sirens are bound to amount to chaotic tornado of misunderstanding and destruction. Yay!
No, seriously. It's an awful bunch of awfulness topped in awfulsauce. I liked it less than The Eternal Ones because at least it had unintentional hilarity and a sassy gay friend. The Tiger's Curse is bad and boring at the same time.
Here's the description on the back: "In this gripping YA fantasy, a sultry Indian prince is cursed to spend eternity as a tiger—until he meets the plucky American teenage girl destine to free him."
You know that thing Aristotle said about probable impossibilities being better than possible improbabilities? That's pretty much everything that's wrong with this book. (Okay, I lie. It's everything except the really bad writing.) I can buy the prince turned into a tiger who lives for hundreds of years part. That's just magic!
What I can't buy is the rest of the plot. Kelsey, our heroine is 17 and lives with foster parents. She gets a 2 week temp job at a circus (what?) taking care of the tiger (what?). She reads it poetry and can tell from it's eyes that it enjoys it. Then a mysterious man comes to the circus to buy the tiger, and he wants to hire Kelsey to transport the tiger to India (what?). Her foster parents are okay with this, which makes me question their fitness to care for children.
Once they're in India, Kelsey discovers that Dihren is really a prince, but even those he's trapped in tiger form, he gets exactly 24 minutes a day as a man (so that they can fall in luuuurve). There's destiny and stuff involved, fo course. For reasons unknown, Kelsey is the chosen one of an Indian goddess who's going to help Dihren, who she nicknames "Ren" almost immediately, become a man again, hopefully a cute one. They have some quest stuff to do, which is mostly boring. They go camping a lot and Kelsey describes every single meal she eats. Lots of power bars. That she also feeds to the tiger, because tigers love power bars, didn't you know?
The best thing about this book? The scene where they were getting chased by monkeys and I had to backtrack a page to figure out where the hell the monkeys came from. (They were statues come to life!)
If you're not convinced yet of how much you do NOT want to read this book, here are two of my frustrated tweets that capture the reading experience. There's some other stuff about a brother and an arranged marriage to some hot girl with violet eyes, but who cares?
There are sequels in the works, of course. By the end of the book Kelsey and Ren haven't completed all the tasks, though Ren is up to six whole hours as a man each day. Kelsey, meanwhile, has decided they can't be together because she's a boring old normal girl and he's a prince, so even though they're in love, he'll eventually find someone better. And those love triangle early warning sirens are bound to amount to chaotic tornado of misunderstanding and destruction. Yay!
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-02 03:02 pm (UTC)I blame this phenomenon on Twilight. Every housewife with a computer read that book and went "Hey, who needs a plot or correct grammar when you have an angsty love story?! I can write something that good!"
no subject
Date: 2011-03-10 01:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-03 01:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-10 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-05 11:16 pm (UTC)This sounds like the summary for a really bad fanfic! SULTRY? Good grief. The exoticism makes my teeth hurt.
There's some other stuff about a brother and an arranged marriage to some hot girl with violet eyes
aldfkjd;jfdsfldf OF COURSE SHE HAS VIOLET EYES, LIKE EVERY MARY SUE ON THE PLANET.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-10 01:33 am (UTC)The book is just as bad as the description implies on that count.
I'm pretty sure violet eyes is going to make an appearance in one of the later books. Except I won't be reading those.