The Stormchasers
Author: Jenna Blum
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Date: May 27, 2010
Publisher: Dutton (Penguin Publishers)
ISBN: 978-0525951551
369 pages
Karena and Charles were like yin and yang. Born twins (not identical!), they were extremely close growing up. But then Charles started to change and the mania – the bipolar disorder – took over. Karena and her mother (and father when he was around) were on pins and needles around Charles, looking for the tell-tale signs that the djinn – the monster – was there. The medication caused severe side effects so Charles didn’t take it. Instead he rode the wave of mania through his passion of storm chasing, taking risks and chasing tornadoes and gathering data for the paper he planned to write. But then an event so shocking occurred that destroyed both Karena and Charles’s lives forever…and they haven’t seen each other in 20 years.
This book is told in three parts. Part 1 is in the present. Karena is determined to locate Charles, if he is still alive. She receives a phone call, out of the blue, on her and Charles’ 38th birthday. It is from a hospital telling her that Charles has checked himself in and listed her as a contact. She is stunned and immediately races to the out-of-state hospital. She misses him by hours, but assumes he is still chasing storms and signs up with a storm chasing company in the midwest in hopes of running into him on a chase. Of course, there is the requisite romance that blossoms between Karena and one of the tour guides, Kevin, and he helps in the search for Charles as well. There are quite a few descriptions of weather-related phenomena in this section that I found fascinating. I’ve always been interested in meteorology, so I found the scientific explanations very intriguing.
Part 2 tells the story of Karena and Charles’s childhood through age 18. We get a deeper understanding of Charles’s bipolar disorder and the effect that is has had on their family. I really admire Karena for what she had to deal with. Charles was extremely difficult, especially since he had an impossible time trying to find a medication that worked for him, so most of the time he didn’t take anything. Karena seemed to be the only one who could calm Charles, who always went with him when he went out chasing a storm so she could keep him safe. She was a very strong girl. But, she was only a young girl and she had a lot to deal with being a teenager and having a brother with bipolar disorder. In this section, the reader also learns of the tragedy that destroyed these young kids’ lives and forever changed them.
In section 3, we pick back up in the present, where section 1 left off. I found the resolution of the story to be somewhat satisfying, if not a bit far-fetched. I guess it just didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I wasn’t completely surprised by it. Does that make any sense? It’s like it had to end that way, you know? In any case, this book was just okay for me. I didn’t love it; I didn’t hate it. After reading Those Who Save Us and falling in love with it, I had really, really, really high expectations and this book didn’t quite live up to them. So, if you are new to Jenna Blum, this is a good read, but I’d definitely recommend Those Who Save Us
