web analytics

Calm Before The Storm

by Celeste Albone (link)

Genre het, romance, drama
Pairings Isaac/OFC, Taylor/OFC
Length prologue, 5 chapters and epilogue
Status Completed

Calm Before The Storm is not a long story. As I’ve said before, I think it’s difficult to tell an entire story in so few chapters. It requires the author to pack a lot of action and emotion into a fairly small amount of words.

The prologue is longer than what I would normally expect a prologue to be, and it feels much more like a first chapter to me. We’re introduced to the main character Rory, she meets Taylor and Isaac, and even goes on something resembling a date with Taylor. It moves rather quickly, even if nothing is huge substance happens.

After that, though, the story skips ahead — a lot. We get a bit of a glimpse of the progress of Rory’s tentative friendship/relationship with Taylor, and then out of nowhere, she’s attacked and raped. It leaves a gap in her memory that Taylor almost seems to take advantage of to move their relationship ahead, but it’s obvious that he means well.

Out of nowhere, chapter four switches to third person. While I think this scene serves the story well, I still dislike such shifts in point of view. That particular portion of the story is handle rather well, but there are lots of questions left unanswered about just why Isaac did what he did. It could have been drawn out into a much longer, more interesting mystery and I would have enjoyed the story a great deal more, even considering the sloppy writing.

Review by Bethany (website)