Tiger's Curse by Colleen Houck is the first book of the Tiger's Curse series. It is about a young girl named Kelsey Hayes from Oregon who just graduated high school. She takes a part time 2 week job working for a circus. She gets awestruck with the tiger at the circus. After a surprise visit with an interesting stranger she end us going to India with the presumtion that she is going to help the tiger acclimate to the jungle. However after a twist of events she finds out that the tiger she grew to love was actually a prince over 300 years earlier and he and his brother were cursed into being tigers. It turns out she was chosen by the Hindi Goddess Durga to help break the curse that these princes were under. The original 4 books of the series are about the 4 different parts of the curse. They must collect 4 different gifts for the goddess and each book is a gift. In the beginning the tigers can be human, but only from 24 minutes for every 24 hours. They end up traveling to a strange underground world. In this world the original tiger named Alagan Dhiren Rajaram, aka Ren, is somehow capable of being a human the entire time. In this world they fight and defeat strange creatures, and collect the first of the 4 gifts. Once they collect the gifts and return to the real world that runs in real time, the princes are each granted 6 hours to be human. However, through the time that they have been together in this strange world and in the real world Kelsey and Ren have fallen in love. Kelsey refuses to believe that he could actually love her and at the end of the bookwhich is the end of the summer she decides that she is going to go home to Oregon for the school year and return the next summer to help break the second part of the curse.
For some reason, I got really into this book. I was able to substitute myself into Kelsey's place and I felt everything that she felt. This I'm sure is due to excellent writing on the part of Colleen Houck. When I finished this book and I lived to read the next one. The very next day I went to Barnes and Noble and got the rest of the books in the series. I loved this book!! I cried and I laughed and I yelled at Kelsey because she wasn't making the decisions I wanted her to. I was very sad to see Kelsey leave Ren. They belonged together. I don't think I have been so involved in a book for a long time. My entire being was so enveloped in the book that I lost track of time when I was reading. I was Kelsey. The brilliant author also combines actual history, with history from the Hindi culture along with the fantasy and storyline.
I recommend this book to anyone who like teen fantasy and teen romance. I loved it. It wasn't your typical fantasy or your typical romance. It's a great book and the gateway to an amazing series. I recommend that you read it, but make sure that you have the rest of the series at your disposal before you start reading it because I can guarantee that once you start, you won't want to stop until you have turned the last page of the last book.
