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Book Summary and Reviews of The Stormchasers by Jenna Blum

The Stormchasers by Jenna Blum

The Stormchasers

A Novel

by Jenna Blum

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  • Published:
  • May 2010, 384 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

In Those Who Save Us, Jenna Blum proved herself a master storyteller with brilliant insight into the spectrum of human emotion. Now, Blum turns her sights to the most intimate and mysterious of family relationships - that between twins - in her powerful and provocative second novel.

As a teenager, Karena Jorge had always been the one to look out for her twin brother Charles, who suffers from bipolar disorder. But as Charles begins to refuse medication and his manic tendencies worsen, Karena finds herself caught between her loyalty to her brother and her fear for his life. Always obsessed with the weather - enraptured by its magical unpredictability that seemed to mirror his own impulses - Charles starts chasing storms, and his behavior grows increasingly erratic .... until a terrifying storm chase with Karena ends with deadly consequences, tearing the twins apart and changing both of their lives forever.

Two decades later, Karena gets a call from a psychiatric ward in Wichita, Kansas, to come pick up her brother, whom she hasn't seen or spoken to for twenty years. She soon discovers that Charles has lied to the doctors, taken medication that could make him dangerously manic, and disappeared again. Having exhausted every resource to try and track him down, Karena realizes she has only one last chance of finding him: the storms. Wherever the tornadoes are, that's where he'll be. Karena joins a team of professional stormchasers -passionate adventurers who will transform her life and give her a chance at love and redemption - and embarks on an odyssey to find her brother before he reveals the violent secret from their past and does more damage to himself . . . or to someone else.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Blum renders the stormy backdrop as richly as she does her nuanced characters." - Publishers Weekly

"Undiscriminating women's fiction fans and those with a special interest in extreme weather should welcome Boston resident and creative writing instructor Blum's second novel." - Library Journal

"[A] meticulous portrait of bipolar disorder and the heartbreaking damage it does to those it affects. A strong second novel from bestseller Blum" - Kirkus Reviews

"The tales work together nicely in this moving, if occasionally overwrought, novel." - Booklist

This information about The Stormchasers was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Elizabeth

Different
"Twindar," bipolar, secrets, family life, manslaughter....

Birthdays and phones...two things Karena likes to forget about, but her birthday and the phone ringing off the hook with bad news both happen on the same day.

The news did help in other ways, though. Karena was learning about what stormchasers do, and she was closer to finding her twin brother who she hadn't seen for twenty years since he too is a stormchaser.

Karena is invited, or rather she invites herself, on a stormchasing tour in the role of newspaper woman, which she is. She meets people who knew her brother, but she didn't get good news about him. The book mainly talks about chasing storms and finding Karena's brother. It also flashes back to Charles and Karena's childhood describing what their life was like as twins and what the life was like with their "absent" parents. Love of course comes into the picture as well...brotherly and sisterly love as well as romantic love.

It wasn't bad, kept your interest....4/5.

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Author Information

Jenna Blum

Jenna Blum is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Those Who Save Us. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and teaches creative writing at Grub Street Writers.

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