Book Review: A Storm of Stories
A Storm of Stories. K.B. Jensen. Crimson Cloud Media LLC, March 4, 2016, Trade Paperback and Kindle, 156 pages.
Reviewed by Suzanne M. Brazil.
In author K.B. Jensen’s A Storm of Stories, the past collides with the present and truth is clouded by mystery. Jensen constructs a framework around a collection of vignettes using the desperate plight of two strangers who meet on a rural road in the middle of a whiteout snowstorm. Huddled together for warmth inside a disabled vehicle, they do their best to survive the dangerous conditions outside the car and share stories that probe at each other’s histories and identities.
Julie is in over her head working and taking classes for her MBA in the evenings. She’s on her way to her parents’ home in a rural Wisconsin town late at night and has a hard time keeping her car on the road in the blizzard.
A hitchhiker appears in the glare of her headlights, and she swerves but cannot avoid him. She was going so slowly that he at first appears unhurt, and, with reservations, she offers to shelter Peter in her vehicle. Their survival soon becomes irrevocably linked.
Jensen has chosen an interesting structure for her novel, incorporating several shorter tales that are unrelated but follow a common theme. Throughout the narrative, she intersperses the conversations and concerns of the two trapped main characters with stories they tell one another to pass the time and to keep them distracted from their rapidly deteriorating chances of survival. The plight of the two main characters opens and closes the novel and is also interwoven throughout the other stories.
Each of the stories-within-a-story is individually titled and involves the pursuit and loss of love and complexities of sexual relationships. The vignettes are set in locales as varied as a transcontinental flight to India, a boat on the open sea, and the ruins of an old chapel. Likewise, the lovers depicted have a wide range of ages and come from diverse backgrounds.
The author does a good job with the peril of the two main characters’ situation and has the ability to paint vivid settings and emotions. Jensen manages to keep the tension in her main characters’ situation while dipping in and out of these other mini-narratives. Will they be rescued in time? Is Peter someone Julie should fear? What is his real story?
“If there was a God, Julie thought, he was surely an angry one, considering the way the wind was howling outside the car windows. White wisps of snow came down in streaks. She hated the dark. She was thinking about hypothermia again. What did they say on the survival shows? When your body temperature falls, your heart, nervous system and other organs don’t work properly. She wondered when that would happen, if it would happen. She felt sleepy. That was a symptom of hypothermia, too, wasn’t it?”
In the end, Jensen has a surprising answer to the mystery of whether they survive or not, and to the real identity of Peter, Julie’s mystery man. Jensen’s story works well as an exploration of romantic relationships and the pursuit of love and happiness. Readers who enjoy a variety of characters with a unifying theme that explores the bigger issues in life will find A Storm of Stories offers much to think about.