Come for the mystery. Stay for the increasingly ridiculous list of people who had reasons to hate the victim.
I just finished The Storm by Rachel Hawkins, and I'm giving it four stars. It wasn't one of those books that kept me awake until 2 a.m. making terrible life choices, but it was entertaining enough that I kept thinking about pretzels every time a new twist landed.
The story follows a cast of characters trapped together with a murder, a mountain of secrets, and enough questionable life choices to keep a therapist employed for years. As the story unfolded, I found myself constantly reassessing who I trusted.
At first, Geneva felt like a narrator I could rely on. Then I realized she simply didn't know enough to be reliable. That's a very different thing from an unreliable narrator. She wasn't lying to me. She was just missing critical pieces of the puzzle, which meant I was missing them too.
Lo, on the other hand, drove me a little crazy. I never quite understood what motivated her until the very end. Every time I thought I had her figured out, she'd do something that sent me back to square one.
August gave me creepy vibes from the beginning, and those vibes never entirely went away.
The victim didn't earn much sympathy from me either. As more details emerged about his behavior, I found myself less interested in mourning him and more interested in figuring out which of the many people he'd wronged finally decided they'd had enough. The man left a trail of broken promises and damaged lives behind him. Posthumously, he became less likable with every revelation.
My one real complaint involves the multiple narrators. Several chapters began without making it immediately obvious whose perspective I was reading. More than once I spent a page or two getting oriented before realizing who was telling the story. It's a small issue, but it occasionally pulled me out of the narrative.
Overall, though, The Storm delivered exactly what I wanted: family drama, buried secrets, suspicious characters, and enough twists to keep me entertained from beginning to end. It may not have cost me any sleep, but it cost me a bag of pretzels.
