First, the book details:
Storm Warning
Dinah McCall
Mira Books
ISBN 1-55166-808-4
And now, the opinion:
I got this book as a result of a club I belong to. Discounted price, so hey, if you don't like the book, you're really not out that much cash. Not as much as you could be, anyway.
After receiving the book, I looked it up on a review site I frequent, and was disappointed to see that their reviewers gave it a D+. Now, I was expecting to get two-thirds into the book and throw it across the room.
That never happened.
Storm Warning begins with introducing us to a school in upstate New York, where seven little girls are a part of a new gifted and talented program. Once a week, they're taken into a classroom, and the lessons commence. During a particularly bad storm, however, lightning strikes, and the school burns down, taking all the records with it.
This is important later.
Flash forward to the present, and a series of vignettes that go by much too quickly, about five of the seven little girls. Each one of the women gets a phone call in which she hears thunder and chimes. She then falls into a sort of trance, and kills herself. Personally, I wish we'd seen a little more about these women, or the series of deaths wasn't piled, quite literally, on top of one another, page after page. I understand that they're supposed to happen quickly, but this was a little tiring.
When we get to number six, however, we actually get to know the character. Georgia, who has become a nun, is one of the girls we meet at the beginning of the book. Georgia, and her frightened friend Virginia. Georgia, coming back from a vacation in Rome, receives news that five of her friends from that school have died, all under similar circumstances, and she begins to piece things together. Specifically that answering the phone is bad. She gathers as much evidence as she can, sends it to Virginia and a friend of hers in the FBI, Sullivan Dean, and hopes for the best.
It doesn't, of course, save her life.
Enter Ginny (Virginia) and Sully (Mr. Dean) as the hero and heroine of the book. What they have to do is clear: figure out who's behind all of this and keep him from doing it to Ginny as well.
As my husband pointed out, there's an old movie that makes use of this story, and so it doesn't seem particularly original. The characters, however, are, and they're characters I actually cared about.
There is a dinner time scene where Ginny has cut ham and cheese sandwiches into rabbit shapes with cookie cutters that had me stifling laughter while I read and my husband slept.
There are other nice touches. Franklin Chee, a Navajo member of the FBI is a wonderful, if not extensively developed character. Ginny's susceptibility to the sound of thunder all throughout the book is also nice.
The ending comes about a bit too tidily. It leaves questions as to just how and why things happened the way they did, and it doesn't really answer them. It seemed too easy, after the build-up of the 370 pages that came before.
So my vote? C+. A D implies unacceptable, to me, and this book just wasn't that bad.
Recommended:
