“By the time I was sixteen, I’d forget this moment. But then I’d remember it again. And everything would change.”
The best way I can describe Still Life With Tornado is to say that it’s intriguing. It’s the kind of book that you can’t predict how it will end, and it really makes you think because there are so many ways it could go. There is something unexpected in every chapter.
Still Life With Tornado is about a sixteen-year-old girl named Sarah who is having an existential crisis. As a reader, we watch this crisis progress and piece it together with chapters alternating between Sarah’s point of view, and her mom’s point of view, and chapters that are flashbacks from the past. I think it’s especially interesting to read because Sarah is going through this existential crisis in real-time in the book, and as a reader, we hear her personal thoughts. I think that in almost all of the books I have read where a character has a mental breakdown it’s told as a reflection with the character looking back on it, not as something that’s happening in the moment.
To be completely honest I am just a little over halfway through the book at the time of writing this, so while I can’t say how I feel about the book overall as I don’t know how it ends, I can say that I am completely hooked and I am so excited to finish it. I am very curious to see where this goes, and I genuinely don’t have a guess as to how it will end. It’s the first time in a while that I have read a book this unpredictable.
I recommend this book to anyone who wants to read something that will really make you think.