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blindmanbaldwin 's review for:
Tomorrow's Storm
by Austin Plambeck
Figure for my first-ever Goodreads post, no better than a book written by a Twitter mutual! Few things scarier than writing fiction in any form, and that fear gets magnified when the writing gets shared with other people — and cranked up even further when it comes in a physical book. When it’s printed, it’s final. It will exist as long as the paper exists. Can’t be pulled from a digital platform or deleted. It is there, on the shelf. So here it is, sitting next to me on my desk on my stack of books, “Tomorrow’s Storm”. A physical book with pages and everything, written by someone I know on Twitter. A book that will exist with all my mountain of books. Quite the heavy thought!
With this existential dread on a Sunday afternoon out of the way — how is it?
The great strength of “Tomorrow’s Storm” is the characters. As I see it, we have three major characters here who the story turns around: Polaris, Cyrus, and Ira. The first two belong to the “light” world and the later is the king of the “dark”, but as would be expected — these characters feel trapped and uncertain about their place in their respective world. It all relates to their parentage: Polaris has an important father who she has pretty stark ideological disagreements with (as most teenage girls do with their dads, I reckon), Cyrus is an orphan harboring a dark secret that he fears will isolate him from his friends, and Ira is a bit of a chosen usurper with no ties to royalty had come up through the house.
Ira is a bit of a Moses-figure, come to think of it — if Moses hadn’t left Egypt and instead came up through the Pharaoh’s lineage. His journey ends up fitting this archetype, as he is called into a different world. A promised land, of sorts. One to bring the boon to his own people suffering in a land of the dead. But the usurper will never be what he is not. In this case, that’s a good thing. Ira (later “Apollo”) wasn’t supposed to be this menace, rather he was molded away from his nature in order to become a tyrant. Which reflects in Ira’s actual motivation. He conquers and kills and maims and brings chaos, but he doesn’t do this because he wants power in the material sense. Rather, he’s looking for a way to bring back his own dead parents. He’s trying to reclaim a life that was lost to him long ago. But we can’t change the past — whether this is Cyrus with his own parents or Ira with his. We can only change what we do now. The dead are dead, the living are alive. When the burning bush calls to you, there’s only one people you can help.
This ends up becoming the core theme, as I see it, of “Tomorrow’s Storm” — moving forward. Which fits well within the coming-of-age/teen journey story archetype of the novel. Everyone has regrets, things they hate and wish they can undo. But that’s all set in stone. Once it is done, it is done. In a crucial moment in the finale, Polaris faces the death of her mother (the parent she has a closer relationship with) and ends up having the opportunity to strike down her mother’s killer — but this would come at the cost of saving the people who are still here. She makes the only choice can make, letting go of her own anger to help the living. Or Cyrus, too, whose moral quandary and inability to forgive himself (straight out of Schrader lead), sends him into a literal death-land and at the threshold of becoming some unrestrained evil. But through the compassion of his friends, he ends up being able to let go and accept he can’t change things. It’s the problem Ira faces, too — his pursuit to bring back the past ends up robbing him of his present. Once they all let go of this, they can press on.
The milieu of the novel is typical of fantasy stylings: big castles, wars, descriptive lore and sacred prophecies. Not really my thing, but a lot of people will appreciate that stuff far more than I can. It takes a bit of time to get into the actual plot into motion, where the two worlds collide and conflict between. This does create a bit of a slowdown in the first chunk (thirdish) of the novel, but this is offset by cutting across the two worlds and painting the dynamic between the character groups (Ira and his court, Polaris/Cyrus and their friends). I’m not equipped to speak on the actual writing mechanics of the novel — I’m used to screenplays where prose is not a thing — but I will say it kept me reasonably engaged where a lot of other novels of this style I’ve tried to read have left me rolling my eyes. There are still the hokey bits to the book, but that’s too be expected of the genre. It’d be like complaining about the cheesiness of a toku show! And, really, what actually matters (the story) is fine. The character-journeys work, the conflict feels right, and the transformation of the finale creates a fulfilling narrative in line with the rest of the text.
There are books I’ve read that I’ve hid or donate because I did not like them, so thoroughly disgusted with the bullshit that I felt like a mark for spending my money on them, but “Tomorrow’s Storm” is most certainly not one of those novels. I am glad I bought the novel, and I am glad I have a physical book to put on my shelf and remember that a guy I know on Twitter wrote a book with some neat characters and a world that fits the metaphor/theme of the story.
With this existential dread on a Sunday afternoon out of the way — how is it?
The great strength of “Tomorrow’s Storm” is the characters. As I see it, we have three major characters here who the story turns around: Polaris, Cyrus, and Ira. The first two belong to the “light” world and the later is the king of the “dark”, but as would be expected — these characters feel trapped and uncertain about their place in their respective world. It all relates to their parentage: Polaris has an important father who she has pretty stark ideological disagreements with (as most teenage girls do with their dads, I reckon), Cyrus is an orphan harboring a dark secret that he fears will isolate him from his friends, and Ira is a bit of a chosen usurper with no ties to royalty had come up through the house.
Ira is a bit of a Moses-figure, come to think of it — if Moses hadn’t left Egypt and instead came up through the Pharaoh’s lineage. His journey ends up fitting this archetype, as he is called into a different world. A promised land, of sorts. One to bring the boon to his own people suffering in a land of the dead. But the usurper will never be what he is not. In this case, that’s a good thing. Ira (later “Apollo”) wasn’t supposed to be this menace, rather he was molded away from his nature in order to become a tyrant. Which reflects in Ira’s actual motivation. He conquers and kills and maims and brings chaos, but he doesn’t do this because he wants power in the material sense. Rather, he’s looking for a way to bring back his own dead parents. He’s trying to reclaim a life that was lost to him long ago. But we can’t change the past — whether this is Cyrus with his own parents or Ira with his. We can only change what we do now. The dead are dead, the living are alive. When the burning bush calls to you, there’s only one people you can help.
This ends up becoming the core theme, as I see it, of “Tomorrow’s Storm” — moving forward. Which fits well within the coming-of-age/teen journey story archetype of the novel. Everyone has regrets, things they hate and wish they can undo. But that’s all set in stone. Once it is done, it is done. In a crucial moment in the finale, Polaris faces the death of her mother (the parent she has a closer relationship with) and ends up having the opportunity to strike down her mother’s killer — but this would come at the cost of saving the people who are still here. She makes the only choice can make, letting go of her own anger to help the living. Or Cyrus, too, whose moral quandary and inability to forgive himself (straight out of Schrader lead), sends him into a literal death-land and at the threshold of becoming some unrestrained evil. But through the compassion of his friends, he ends up being able to let go and accept he can’t change things. It’s the problem Ira faces, too — his pursuit to bring back the past ends up robbing him of his present. Once they all let go of this, they can press on.
The milieu of the novel is typical of fantasy stylings: big castles, wars, descriptive lore and sacred prophecies. Not really my thing, but a lot of people will appreciate that stuff far more than I can. It takes a bit of time to get into the actual plot into motion, where the two worlds collide and conflict between. This does create a bit of a slowdown in the first chunk (thirdish) of the novel, but this is offset by cutting across the two worlds and painting the dynamic between the character groups (Ira and his court, Polaris/Cyrus and their friends). I’m not equipped to speak on the actual writing mechanics of the novel — I’m used to screenplays where prose is not a thing — but I will say it kept me reasonably engaged where a lot of other novels of this style I’ve tried to read have left me rolling my eyes. There are still the hokey bits to the book, but that’s too be expected of the genre. It’d be like complaining about the cheesiness of a toku show! And, really, what actually matters (the story) is fine. The character-journeys work, the conflict feels right, and the transformation of the finale creates a fulfilling narrative in line with the rest of the text.
There are books I’ve read that I’ve hid or donate because I did not like them, so thoroughly disgusted with the bullshit that I felt like a mark for spending my money on them, but “Tomorrow’s Storm” is most certainly not one of those novels. I am glad I bought the novel, and I am glad I have a physical book to put on my shelf and remember that a guy I know on Twitter wrote a book with some neat characters and a world that fits the metaphor/theme of the story.