Tangled Up In You (Meant To Be #4)

Quite the change of pace from Lord of The Rings, I went back to one of my comfort reads in the form of a simple but hopefully entertaining romcom. The Meant To Be Series had previously caught my eye simply for its concept of retelling Disney movie classics into contemporary romance books but it wasn’t quite strong enough a pitch to convince me. Moreover I could already imagine some issues with blending the child appropriate story developments of the movies to the more mature and realistic aspects of a contemporary romance. Tangled Up In You got the added benefit of being written by Christina Lauren, an author whose previous work I enjoyed. So off I went following Ren/Rapunzel’s story and how she falls in love with Flynn/Fitz/Eugene/Edward.

The story starts off quite positively, it’s very low stakes and it’s definitely got that Disney “nice” feeling with a regular sprinkling of mild humour. It stumbles a bit to find its own identity by dropping references to song lyrics from the movies and naming ultimately irrelevant characters just to say “hey remember this character from the movie, they’re technically here too”. Pascal, the lizard is a cat now and is present for only about 3 lines of narration as one example of this. Max, the horse, is now Fitz’ car and very awkwardly both Fitz and Ren regularly talk about and to Max like it’s a living being which is very odd. Especially so when they talk about the car using “he/him” pronouns; I have nothing against people personifying their car a bit but cars are usually either an “it” or a “she” but it being a “he” here really feels like Disney pushing for the “we need to know that it’s the horse”.

Speaking of Disney pushing, we also get jokes that fall flat like the joke around the name “Rapunzel” being met with a “Gesundheit”. They try to do it again here with “Ren Gylden” but that’s just a regular name so the joke doesn’t work and it really feels again like Disney having pushed for a quota of movie references even if they didn’t fit. We also get some very High School Musical Disney-esque showdowns with everyone clapping in the room and underlining Ren’s wittiness with unnatural comments like “savage” or “totally wicked”. This is particularly egregious when the book is forced into the tavern scene from the movie. In the movie, Rapunzel and Flynn enter a tavern filled with criminals which Rapunzel turns over through the magic of Disney singing and that’s fine in the context of a fantasy Disney movie for kids. Now in the book, Fitz and Ren enter a bar filled with criminals which Rapunzel turns over through the magic of doing some bad dad jokes and that’s awful and unbelievable because it’s completely at odds in the context of a realistic modern day setting. Additionally, the reason she starts doing her act of stand up is because she wants to get her wallet back that’s been stolen and not only does she get it back, she also gets around 1000 USD in cash which Fitz pretty heavily specifies is likely to originate from some form of illegal activity and yet Ren enjoys her newfound wealth and spends it willy dilly like there’s no ethical qualm to be had here.

This wouldn’t be as big of an issue if Ren was the pinnacle of virtue, she’s nice, educated, pleasant, empathetic, caring, crafty, sweet, cute and she just lacks a bit of street smarts. She’s exactly the sort of character who would be hesitant to take and spend 1000 USD just given to her by a criminal and would instead bring that money to the police. Nevertheless Ren is overall a very endearing character and one can only feel sorry for the poor girl whose parents, Steve and Gloria essentially enslaved her to their lifestyle isolating her from any potential friends and refusing her even the most basic level of freedom. They are arguably more cruel than the villain they are meant to represent from the movie especially as their motives are frankly dubious. As one would expect, just how it was in the movie, Steve and Gloria aren’t Ren’s real parents and Ren finds this out through a DNA test done at college which reveals her dad living somewhere in Atlanta. Ren blackmails Fitz into driving her there as she caught him cheating his grade in the school’s computer system. At this point I had two theories: either Ren was victim of a very gruesome kidnapping as we don’t even get the magical component justifying the kidnapping like we did in the movie or she was just adopted and we get a much softer “villain” and much more positive conclusion. It turns out that the former was true, Ren was simply kidnapped for absolutely no real reason. Ren’s real father, Chris, got divorced and Steve and Gloria being complete third parties to this (they’re not even friends of Chris’) somehow thought that Chris could not possibly manage as a single dad and kidnapped Ren and committed to their no technology lifestyle (and in doing so avoiding press and police). This would be all fine and good (albeit still quite weak a justification for kidnapping) if the book didn’t end with both of them trying to kill Ren by shooting at her and failing that engaging at a shoot-out with the police and the FBI in which Steve is killed. There is quite a difference between kidnapping a child for some twisted reason of “it’s for Ren’s own good” and going “right the cops are here, get the guns and shoot the child” and the book just glances over this. It’s a good concept and I think there was potential here for a much darker, much more serious thriller but it couldn’t possibly fit in the Disney romcom and so I must ask: was it really necessary to have such a dark backstory for Ren, even darker than the movie’s?

The story on Fitz’ side isn’t quite as dramatic although it is also filled with parental issues and adoption drama. Fitz was part of the foster system and got into legal issues for car theft. He luckily encountered a very generous judge who offered him erasure of his criminal past if Fitz could complete college with the highest possible grades. At the same time, Fitz was adopted by a narcissistic father which made Fitz decide that his life task should be to become a lawyer and sue his adoptive father and ruin his life. At least that’s how it starts because by the end of the book, Fitz decides to do something else that “would pay less but that wasn’t his priority anymore” as if any of Fitz’ previous motivations were led by money. I don’t know how the writers wrote a character who is explicitly anti-wealth and then somehow wrote later on that he decided that “having money doesn’t matter to him anymore” as if it ever did. By the end of the book his adoptive father also is ever so slightly more pleasant to him, having learnt that he got caught in a shoot-out and somehow that’s enough for Fitz and the narrator to justify years of narcissistic abuse. The story generally struggles with themes of abuse as even Ren is adamant that Steve and Gloria never abused her which is plain wrong and sends the very wrong message (they tried to kill her for crying out loud).

Anyway, it’s a romance book so maybe that’s where my focus should be and it’s honestly…fine? Ren’s just dead pleasant so it makes sense for Fitz to fall in love with her. Fitz is equally pleasant and protective so it makes sense for Ren to fall in love with him. They just work well together, they have good banter, know how to have a good time without it always revolving around their physical attractiveness and it’s overall quite enjoyable to read through. It does get a bit sappy with both of them being so overly cheesily cute but a big part of that is due to the voice actors for the audiobook. The chapters are technically split between Ren and Fitz each with separate voice actors but since they’re both narrated in the third person the change of voice actors feels pointless because there’s never any first person introspection justifying the change. Ren’s voice actress felt plainly miscast and Fitz’ voice actor seemed competent whilst he had to read grumpy Fitz but fell into a never ending “horny voice” pattern once the romance got started. It wasn’t offensively bad but it definitely wasn’t Andy Serkis either. Getting back to the romance, mushiness aside, it progressed pleasantly and healthily until the story got to the traditional 75% last minute drama twist.

As it was in the movie Ren is caught by her fake mother who convinces her to leave everything behind and return to the conservative living style. In the movie it’s already a bit of a stretch but Rapunzel does see Flynn sailing off in the distance supposedly abandoning her so it’s understandable. In the book Ren and Fitz had a chapter of open discussion where Fitz admitted having had issues with the police and explained how it was difficult for him to talk about it but that he was willing to make the effort, that it would just take some time. Ren was fully supportive of this and was much appreciative of Fitz’ honesty, emphasising that she was happy to take the revelation as they came and not before he was ready to share them. So obviously when Gloria shows up and tells Ren that he was arrested for a car theft she immediately thinks “I just had a mature discussion with Fitz about honesty and how I promised I wouldn’t rush him and that he could reveal his background with me when he felt ready so this revelation doesn’t change anything and Gloria is still a lying piece of shit kidnapper who abused me for decades”. Of course not, Ren immediately thinks of Fitz as a liar who she should have never trusted and clearly the mother who’s hidden her real father’s identity for decade and is still lying to her is the person she should trust. It is genuinely one of the worst if not the worst 75% drama I’ve ever read, especially so when 3 pages later Ren asks verbatim “why had she been so quick to assume he’d keep this from her indefinitely?”. The question is never answered, Ren’s just a goldfish I guess.

Anyway, Steve gets shot, Gloria is imprisoned, Ren meets her real father, Fitz and Ren get together, they eat ice cream, make plans for the future, the end. It was fine, it’s still in its DNA a mostly child friendly Disney story so it manages to entertain an adult but it’s not really engaging enough nor written well enough to trade blows with any “proper” adult romance and that’s fine but I can’t help but be disappointed at how bad some of its story beats were as a results.