Storm Front

Edit: Dropping my rating. “Okay” describes it best...cut out all the sloppy romance and I'd be okay, but I just don't like thinking back to grownups acting like teens and refusing to grow up and get a life and instead being stuck in drama. I tried to be nice to the book because I liked where we ended up, but who am I fooling? I thought we ended up there in book one. It's like leaping to the top of a sand heap and sliding down over and over again. These kids never learn from theirs or from others' mistakes, and while they have a sort of faith the lesson never quite sticks.

Original review: I do love a good story centered around weather and rescues. Ty and Brette are some of my favorites out of the series so far, and I truly enjoyed their parts.

I also really enjoyed the ongoing search for this missing townsfolk and the putting together the clues to figure out where they were.

Ben and Kacey, though...what in the world. They had been my previous favorite couple, but apparently they forgot how to be adults. This spoiler is for if you haven't read the first book yet: Are you SERIOUS that somehow the event of the wedding being perfect is the reason you refuse to tie the knot and raise your daughter in a two-parent household? I understand dealing with circumstances if you can't change them, and so on, but here you have a couple who is wildly in love and having a hard time controlling their passions and Kacey is a single mom to their daughter, and in four years you can't figure out how to get married? Epic fail. In the end they won me over a bit more, but I was really mad at them for a major part of the book.

Weather accuracy: terms aren't straight. I wish a weather person could have read the book over, because “mesocyclone” was termed “tornado” in one spot (rotation does not equal a tornado in most situations. It means the conditions are favorable for a tornado.) A tornado dropping to the ground is not a “forming mesocyclone”...it's a funnel cloud forming. It comes out of the mesocyclone, which is a large rotating storm cell. One thing that rather shocked me was that no mention of a wall cloud was ever made. As someone who grew up with two storm-spotter parents and got her own storm-spotter certificate as soon as possible, this is an essential symptom of most developing tornadoes. Also no mention of updrafts or anvils were made. Everything was blamed on two types of clouds, some radar formations, and the actual tornadoes. Furthermore, the second line of severe weather would not have taken experienced storm chasers by surprise to that extent. One rumble of thunder and their ears would be tuned to the wind directions and the height of the cloud and the possibility of further severe weather. I took my first storm watching class (sitting in the back between my parents at the age of seven) back in the days of NOAA weather reporters still giving live announcements (no Computer Bob in the mid nineties) and got my full certification before smartphones were a thing. You are NOT dependent on radar images to figure out where a tornado might happen. That's the whole point of becoming a storm spotter. Anyway, here's a quick and easy link to some of the terms I was expecting to see used in this storm-centered book: https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/thunderstorms/types/

Notes on content: “sanitized” swearing including gosh, jeez, gee (Seriously, these terms are really getting on my nerves more and more this year.)

Frank talk about Ben's pal having an orgy in a hotel room and about lustful desires between adults.

Thanks to the publisher for a free review copy. A positive review was not required.