Jenn Bullard’s Tangled in Knots: A Dark Omegaverse Novel is a hard sell. It requires an enormous number of trigger warnings. I’m not even sure that I *want* to recommend it. Don’t get me wrong – Bullard is a talented writer and creates a very detailed and realized world – but then concept of the book is just… DARK doesn’t even begin to cover it.
STOP READING NOW IF YOU ARE EASILY DISTURBED BY VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
As with most Omegaverse novels, Tangled in Knots is a why choose? romance. The part that is the really hard sell is that the four male protagonists kidnap the female main character, kill her dad, blow up her home, and then literally participate in her gang rape while she is being sold off in a sex trafficking ring. That is A LOT to come back from.
What we come to learn is that the four MMC have been brainwashed and deeply traumatized by their father. To the point that all of their choices are viewed through the lens of protecting each other and fuck everyone and everything else. And, unfortunately for her, the FMC gets tossed in their path. The father is a deeply violent and psychotic individual who has a history of doing shit like leaving them in the woods in the middle of a Minnesota winter in nothing but pjs and expecting them to walk out on their own. At ages 12, 10 and 6. And then he punished the 12 year old because they didn’t walk out as quickly as he wanted them to.
Adira, the FMC, is no push over. She just has a perpetual case of wrong place, wrong time. She’s feisty, determined to make her way in the world, and is learning that hardest of all lessons: it is okay to ask for help. She didn’t ask to be scent matched and bonded with one of the alphaholes that treated her so abominably, but there you have it. Can you imagine your biology betraying you that way with someone who has abused you so terribly?
Bullard somehow manages to write her way out of the corner that she put herself in, but in a lot of ways this book is more about Adira and her mates putting in the work and trying to fix themselves than it is about romance or love scenes. And this a looong one. Maybe not Gabaldonian in length, but it is more than 200k words.
I started this one, even knowing what it is about, only because I tend to be an obsessive completist that can’t leave a series partially read. Am I glad I read it? Undecided. Do I wish that I could have skipped this installment? Also undecided. Since she’s world building, there are things that happen here that I’ll need to be aware of in later books, but I think that I ultimately would have been happier just puzzling my way through than reading this huge trauma dump of a novel.