Nicole Reads A Lot

I have been eagerly awaiting this fourth entry in Snow’s Kathleen Turner series, and I was not disappointed at all. I’d been waiting since I read the third book in this series for this book to come out, and Ms. Snow had a lot of expectations to live up to. I’m pleased to say that she exceeded my wildest hopes for this book. A lot of the things that bothered me about the earlier books in this series were missing here. Kathleen had greater agency; she was more of a participant in her destiny, and I felt like she commanded more respect. Of course, this could be because she spent a great deal of this book in the company of Kade, the brother who was always more likely to treat her like a capable adult. I must admit that Blane bothered me a lot in the past. He seemed at times to treat Kathleen like an ignorant appendage, and I felt that he didn’t always afford her the respect that anybody should give another rational adult. And that was before he went and accused her of cheating on him with his brother. AFTER HE’D RESCUED HER FROM SEXUAL SLAVERY. I don’t even know how he could have believed that story at all, even before you got to the part where the person who she’d supposedly cheated with was HIS BROTHER WHOM HE’D RESCUED FROM A CHILDHOOD OF NEAR-DICKENSIAN PRIVATION. I mean, really.

Alas, poor Alaric…I mean Blane

Even though Blane’s character has been consistent throughout this series, this book marks the first time that I felt more than annoyance, exasperation, or anger at him; the sense I got when reading Out of Turn was that Blane was a man living with a suffocating amount of regret over his past mistakes. I’m a big fan of the extended grovel, and in way too many romance novels,  the hero (because, let’s be real here, it’s almost always the guy) gets off way too lightly for doing something terrible to the heroine. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” might have worked in the ’70s, but I am not on board with it at all. Thankfully, it seems that neither is Ms. Snow. Here, I got the feeling that Blane really did understand the magnitude of the mistake he made when he listened to his awful uncle, accused Kathleen of sleeping with Kade, broke the engagement, and pushed his brother out of his life. What’s more, he apologized and really meant it. Not just to get back in Kathleen’s pants, or even begrudgingly: he apologized sincerely and acknowledged the possibility that he might never be able to fix what he’d broken. Even more heartening, Kathleen (after a reasonable amount of time and soul-searching), offers him sincere forgiveness, while admitting that she may never be able to trust him again.

Team Kade – still, forever, some more

I still don’t connect to Blane the way I do to Kade – he’s just not my kind of guy – but I felt like I came away from this book with a greater appreciation for who he is and why Kathleen would have a difficult time choosing between him and his brother. That being said, I’m 100% on Team Kade. Obviously. I mean, I was even before I read this book, but I loved seeing Kathleen and Kade work through their relationship without having to work around Blane. Sure, he’s the elephant in the room throughout the book, as the other two try, both subtly and overtly, to explore their feelings while sparing his, but DAMN. This book basically reads like the Team Kathleen and Kade playbook.

I really appreciated how Ms. Snow was able to advance the interpersonal relationships in this story, while also moving along storylines that have been in play since book one. It was good to catch up with tertiary characters with whom the main characters had interacted in the past, and to see that events that happened in previous books still resonated with the characters in this one. To my mind, Out of Turn is the strongest book in this series yet. Although I spent a lot of time gushing over Kathleen and Kade, I really love how well the strained relationship between Kade and Blane was portrayed here. It’s easy for me to say which brother I’d pick, but I really felt how torn Kathleen was by worries about the effect that her choice would have on the other brother. The balancing at between these three characters is delicious. The whole thing works even better when I think of this novel in terms of The Vampire Diaries (when that show was still must-watch television for me): Kathleen is a smarter, more capable Elena; Kade is Damon (yum); and Blane is some weird amalgamation of Stefan and Sober Alaric.

I cannot wait for book 5.