Tangled

I’ll admit, my skepticism ran high when I first pressed play on Tangled. Forbidden romance tropes are everywhere, and the premise—best friend’s little sister, bad boy, inevitable doom—felt like a retread of every YA novel I’d ever groaned at. But Pavlov’s writing and the duo’s narration pulled me under faster than I expected. Rose’s voice is the kind that makes you lean in, even when the protagonist’s choices make you want to scream. She nails the push-and-pull of teenage desire: the way love feels like a rebellion when it’s really just a distraction from the harder work of growing up. Samuels, meanwhile, turns a one-dimensional "bad boy" into something achingly human. His performance gives depth to a character who could’ve easily been a caricature, and the way he and Rose play off each other in their duets is *chef’s kiss*—raw, unfiltered, and just a little dangerous. My one critique? The middle act sags slightly under the weight of its own drama, stretching what could’ve been a tight 200 pages into a slog that tests your patience. And while the production’s moody ambiance works most of the time, the sound design occasionally overdoes it, drowning out some of the quieter emotional moments. Still, these are minor quibbles in an audiobook that mostly delivers on its promise: a romance that’s messy, consuming, and impossible to forget once it’s over.