The saga of the Dust continues! Storm is slated for the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy blog tour here in a few months so I will wait to do a detailed review until then, but I can’t resist gushing about the newest installment of the Swipe Series a little.

One of the things that frequently bothers me about Dystopian series is a strong sense of nothing being planned. There are tropes involved that we understand so readily that often we accept their existence without explanation. For example, the secret black ops government agents after our heroes. These are so integral to the plot of Dystopian novel we assume they’re hiding in the shadows before we ever see them. And it would be so easy for an author to use them in a story without any explanation of where they come from, who they answer to, and what their goals really are. In the Swipe Series though, Evan never once cheats. Everything on the page is there for a purpose, and everything is firmly grounded in his world’s reality.

In fact, a great deal of the focus of this book shifts away from the core group we’ve followed up until now. Don’t worry, everyone’s still here…for now anyway. Peck, Logan, Erin, Hailey, the Dust all get plenty of page time. But Evan expands his ensemble cast a bit, and this gives us a wealth of new insight into the government including meeting the two Dear Leaders face to face. I don’t want to give too much away, but the suspense has actually been ramped way up with this book thanks to one of our new “narrators.” We spend a great deal of time in her head and start to wonder if anyone in this massive web of intrigue really knows where all the cards are or if everyone is just bluffing for all their worth.

Which leads to me my one massive disappointment with this book. Somewhere along the way I’d read something wrong or misinterpreted because I was certain this was a trilogy, and it most certainly is not! All through Storm, more and more questions were added rather than answers, and I kept wondering how on earth all this would be wrapped up by the end of the book. So in case I’m not the only one who got this wrong, don’t go into Storm expecting the end of the series. On the one hand I’m actually very happy to get more books about the Dust. On the other, when you start a book thinking you’ll finally get all your answers, finding out it’s not the end is a little sad.

Probably the most common book recommendation question I get asked is, “I/My child just finished the Hunger Games and would like more books like that. What do you recommend?” The Swipe Series. There are a few more series I’m following that have a lot of promise like Jill Williamson’s Safe Lands Series, but I feel that the Swipe Series is quite a bit safer for younger readers. Swipe, Sneak, and Storm are little more focused on the action than the deep philosophical questions of life although there is a lot to learn and think about on the political front.  

My thanks to Thomas Nelson for providing me with a copy of Storm via NetGalley in return for my honest opinion of the book.