Jonah wishes he could get the girl, but he’s an outcast and she’s the most perfect girl he knows. And their futures seemed destined to fork apart: Jonah’s physical condition is debilitating, and epileptic seizures fill his life with frustration. Whereas Stormi is seemingly carefree, and navigates life by sensing things before they happen. And her most recent premonition is urging her to leave town.

When Stormi begs Jonah for help, he finds himself swept into a dark mystery his small town has been keeping for years. And the answers Stormi needs about her own past could possibly destroy everything Jonah has ever known—including his growing relationship with Stormi herself.

I love a good speculative fiction story, so I was excited to read a new story by a new-to-me author. The idea that the main character miraculously survived a tornado and was therefore named Stormi was a little cheesy, but I wanted to see how the rest of it played out. Unfortunately the rest of it was still pretty cheesy and rather confusing.

For starters, the novel is full of stories that just don’t matter. They’re included to show Stormi’s prophetic ability, but they ended up making it more confusing – why didn’t Jonah get the back-correcting surgery? There’s no reason given, so I spent the rest of the novel wondering how that flashback would relate to the rest of the book (it didn’t).

Then there’s the big reveal – the town’s secret that only Stormi can share because she’s prophetic. The problem is that the town’s secret is from the past. There’s no reason someone else couldn’t have revealed it. I’m still not sure why she had to be involved.

And the whole trip to Bishop and Q. Apparently that’s the last place on earth where Jonah and Stormi should have gone, yet they were sent there. They live in the contemporary United States – they could have gone anywhere in the country, but they end up in the one place they should avoid. I’m still not sure why they were sent there.

There were several other parts of the story that left me wondering either why they were included or how that situation would have really happened in the real world (e.g. a small, poor town rebuilding a super max prison with their own money when no government entity or private business financed it or has any intention of using the prison again).

Overall the story was more confusing than entertaining. I kept waiting for an a-ha moment, but it didn’t happen. The concept had potential to be a page turner, but it didn’t work for me.

*I received a free copy of this book. The opinions are my own.