Customer Reviews

Stormwalker (Stormwalker Series, Book 1)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Wow. Just wow. I had originally thought that the Native American female lead was soon becoming overused. I thought: okay, the concept of the story sounds interesting, but this Janet character probably wont stand a chance against Mercy Thompson or Jane Yellowrock. How very wrong I was.

If anything, I must concede now that Janet holds this certain type of allure that neither Jane nor Mercy have. I've always been attracted to the types of characters who have some elemental powers, and Janet Begay's specialty is definitely something that interests me. As a Stormwalker, she has the ability to control any storm around her--even if it gives her the worst hangover-feeling after. Imagine Storm from X-men, except instead of commanding storms around her, Janet needs a storm in order to tap into her power. This lends to interesting situations that reveal just how cunning and resourceful she can be.

There is no random man that Janet stumbles upon during her journey. Instead, readers are introduced to a sexy, arrogant, frustrating fire-wielder named Mick. Can I just say that Mick is one sizzling ex-boyfriend? In the beginning of the book, when he finally saunters into the current scene (and into my heart), Janet slowly begins to explain why the two separated in the first place, and I felt myself sympathizing with the poor girl. Who would ever want to be smothered while dating someone? I know I wouldn't. Yet despite this, I still wanted to grab Janet by the shoulders to give her a good shake. Actually, now that I think about it, I wanted to do the same to Mick also. Gotta love it when characters are ignorant...especially in the good way.

But Tori, you might ask, how can characters be ignorant in a good way? While the tension betwixt the two characters is frustrating to a certain extent, I think that on some level, the two know that they--despite differing feelings--care for each other, which comes before all else. There is this certain appeal, for me at least, when two characters have a history together. Allyson doesn't instantly deliver a relationship with a happily ever after for either characters, but she does offer a relationship with instant gratification. Readers aren't forced to be wary due to anything being rushed. If Janet and Mick decide they want to have sex, then we can rationalize it by saying that, due to a past together, they are reconnecting. Humans do it all the time. It was perfect for the two of them.

I'm almost tempted to guarantee that this plot will make you grow animated at some point, but I won't. Read the book, and see for yourself if you had the same reaction I did. For me, it was when I reached the end of chapter 17. I won't go into the details about what happened (because it is way too juicy to spoil for anyone) but all I could think and gasp and then scream was: "What, what, what, WHAT?!" In fact, I'm still flabbergasted. Biggest. plot. twist. ever. I loved it!

Allyson James has a new and interesting series well worth reading. Not only are the covers for this series beautiful (sorry, had to mention it), but her characters and plot are so unique and interesting that one would be deemed crazy for not giving this series a shot. You hear me? Get this book pronto!

I was pretty underwhelmed by this book. The description made it sound interesting, but the characters were kind of a let down for me.

Janet Begay is a Stormwalker. She can ride a storm and draw power from it, but usually she ends up with the short end of the stick. She's helpless to resist the power of the storm and usually ends up sick and exhausted after it passes. She doesn't like that aspect much, but she's learning to deal.

Janet heads to Magellan with the excuse of helping the police chief search for his missing daughter. Janet is committed to finding the missing girl, Amy, but also has a more pressing motive for arriving in town. Magellan is home to a vortex that Janet's mother wants unlocked. She plans to use Janet as her tool and make her a willing slave. Janet knows that the time has finally come to stop her mother once and for all.

Janet has some trouble with Sheriff Nash, Amy's fiance, and one of the suspects in her disappearance. Nash basically goes on a power trip and locks her in jail and won't believe her when she says something bad from the magical world is headed her way. For some reason everyone seemed okay with the fact that Janet was held in jail without being arrested or in-processed. They were still okay when Janet was busted out of jail and taken back to her hotel. What?

The guy responsible for the jail bust is Mick, Janet's ex. They've been apart for years (at Janet's instigation) but they've never really gotten over each other. Janet's an extreme pushover where Mick is concerned. She's very willing to just give up trying get her way and will let him do whatever he wants. She also very easily decides to resume having sex with him - only to help draw off the power of course! I wanted to like Mick, but because I was stuck in Janet's head I never got to know him well enough.

Janet didn't know anything about him when they first got together and she still didn't know anything about him when she finally left him for being too secretive and smothering. She didn't even know his last name and he would disappear on her and then show back up like nothing happened. She put up with that for six months before she finally got it together enough to leave him. She just seemed like the biggest idiot to me. She also seemed extremely young in all her thoughts. I'm not referring to the flashbacks either. Her internal whining and insecurity reminded me of an extremely immature teenager with her first boyfriend. It was very off putting.

I also couldn't help but think she was the most dense individual in the world for not figuring out what Mick was hiding. Now I don't blame her for not knowing why he first integrated himself with her, but I do think it was blatantly obvious what Mick was in addition to a fire wielder. When the author drops so many blatant hints again and again it doesn't make her protagonist look like the sharpest tack in the box when she doesn't figure it out. It just makes her look stupid.

I wish I would have liked this book more, but I just couldn't make myself enjoy it. I doubt I'll be picking up anything else in this series.

Review courtesy of [...]

There is a lot to like about Allyson James first book in her new Stormwalker series. The stunning cover art by Tony Mauro is just the beginning. The world building involves a Native American twist on the four elements: Earth, Fire, Water, Wind, and a mythological history of earth. The main character, Janet Begay, is a Stormwalker. When a storm rages, Janet becomes essentially an X-man (minus the creepy white eyes and comic book spandex).

I did have a moment of disorientation in the beginning of STORMWALKER wondering if I'd missed some earlier novella in this series. Thankfully no. Allyson just chose to throw her characters right in the middle of the story and provide the back-story of Janet meeting both Mick and her mother in flashback chapters. So if you feel like you missed something in the first few chapters, don't worry, it's coming.

Normally Janet endures the mother of all magical hangovers the day after riding a storm, unless Mick is there. Mick is Janet's on again/off again lover. With fire abilities that rival her storm powers, Mick can siphon off her storm energy and leave her calm and nearly sexually sated.

Speaking of sex, there is quite a bit in STORMWALKER. A lot of Janet's magical abilities have sexual repercussions. Tantric magic, for example, created by some spectacularly creative sex, can reinforce magical wards. Ultimately, there ended up being more references to crazy wild sex than actual descriptions. Most, not all, of the sex scenes are relatively brief and only moderately graphic.

And I haven't even mentioned Beneath yet. Imagine the planet as an onion with layer upon layer of worlds, each better than the last. Various gods and humans escaped through to this world and sealed below the rest, including Janet's psychopathic mother. Some of Beneath's nastier creatures made it into our world including skinwalkers and nightwalkers (aka shifters and vampires).

As far as the plot goes, I never really bought into Janet's reason for being in Arizona. She explains that she's been hired to find a missing woman, and decides to buy and fix up an old hotel in the process. The how and why are a bit weak, as is the initial reason for her level of dedication. The clues that she puts together are also pretty random, and I still think that the last leap in logic was totally unbelievable.

But I didn't really like STORMWALKER because of the missing woman mystery. I liked it because of the main characters and the paranormal world that they lived in. Janet is this tough biker chick who never got over her first love. She struggles believably with wanting to just be loved and knowing her own self-respect won't allow her to stay with a man who won't reveal anything about himself. Mick, for all his smoking good looks and fiery nature, doesn't seem to know how to love Janet the way she needs to be loved. Each one is trying so desperately to protect the other that they don't realize that they may lose each other anyway. Their whole relationship is volatile and addictively compelling and I can't wait to read more about them when Firewalker comes out on November 2nd.

Sexual Content: Several sex scenes of various lengths and graphical intensity. References to ménage sex. Attempted rape.

The premise was good, writing fine, characters interesting but somehow it just didn't come together for me. Everything was sort of all over the place. She's building the hotel, fighting her evil mother, solving a missing person's case, working thru interpersonal relationships with boyfriend, family, and friends. Powers are all over the place --- sometimes on, sometimes off, sometimes out of control, sometimes under control, some people have, some people don't, some people get possessed. With the amount of evil beings on the loose, you'd think they'd be front page by now. Even confronted with definitive, multiple, in your face proofs, one of the main characters still insist the supernatural doesn't exist. That was just plain annoying, already. Overall, just messy, busy, and not a solid story.

I gave Stormwalker such a low rating for a few reasons. First of all, four chapters of info dump. I had to force - F-O-R-C-E myself to read through them because a) it's a book club book and b) a friend had already read it and said it was fantastic. Second of all, my issues with the main character. I know that these are both reasons why I rated this book like I did, and with that said, I can also understand why people would like this book. There are large expanses of it written well with engaging material and exciting 'stuff' going on - for me though, I couldn't forget either point a or point b.

The Setting -- is a small town, in the middle of the desert in Arizona. There's not much detail given to the setting through the narrative except to depict it with a few, sparse words here and there. Usually it's to remark about the heat or the presence of a storm - which from the title you can denote is a fairly important aspect of the story. I thought that there was more of the beauty and misery of the desert could have been brought out to make the setting seem more alive. For an area that is supposed to be alive with energy and magic, I thought it could have come through more vividly.

The Characters -- are going to get a bashing and a lot of loving from me. First off, there is Janet, the Stormwalker, who is an idiot. Okay, she's not a flat out idiot, and I know my distaste for her stems from my own biases to do with women who intentionally stay in bad relationships. Yes, her relationship-in-question turns out to be a good thing, but ladies, if a guy is bad for you - he's bad for you and you need to get out. Not romanticize what he might be and stick it out. You get out, suck up the losses, and move on. For a big chunk of the book I had to talk myself into reading it because I simply got very frusterated with her.

I'll be honest and say that I finished the book because of Mick; the love interest. I will not give up the big surprise about him, but he made the book worth reading - for me. I thought that after reading one of the reveals about him that he could have come across as experiencing things more in relation to his true nature, but I still like him. He's what you want in a hunky hero. He has something dark in his past that makes it difficult on him, he's protective, he's sexy, he has this awesome power and he's the only person Janet can be around and not hurt. You can't help but love Mick for what he sacrifices and how you see him grow, or at least get the revelations of how much he's changed.

Besides these two, there are other characters, like Coyote and Nash that make the story vivid. While I don't necessarily like all of these characters, they contribute to a very interesting cast of characters.

The Plot -- was overall, straight forward. You went into it knowing that the big end game was. There was a caviate for what brought it about that's rather anticlimatically unfolded. The most interesting bits to me were the action parts when Janet was attacked or used her powers, and those concerning Mick.

I liked the way the book ended and I'd be tempted to read Firewalker for Mick alone.

I had high hopes for this book and in the end I did enjoy the plot and most of the characters. What made me cringe the whole time I was reading was the writing style. Everything is bluntly told to you, even when she uses some nice descriptive language she follows up bluntly telling you what it all means.This gets even worse in the romance department because like someone else said it starts coming across like a bad porno.
Another trait I found pretty annoying was to constantly remind you of previous plot points. The plot really isn't that thick that you lose some detail in the action. It occurs in a span of a week and while there is several things going on there really isn't that much adding to the story. It leads to a lot of extraneous seeming information. And almost worst of all is how it is all wrapped in a pretty bow the last few pages. I could have pretty much done without that part, in fact I got interrupted after the showdown at the end and I really didn't miss it when I finally sat down to read it.

The plot in this book is all over the place. Characters behave in odd illogical ways, such as when Janet is arrested and held for no reason at all. The book jumps from one action scene to another without much character development in between. Each chapter introduces a new almost unrelated element in the mythology - here is a magic mirror, next a possessed biker gang, etc. Lots of interesting ideas, there just wasn't much pulling them together and I just didn't much like the characters.

Originally posted at Wicked Lil Pixie Reviews.

Stormwalker is the first book in Allyson James's new Stormwalker series and it was such a pleasant surprise! I was hooked from the first page. The book and series follow Janet Begay, a Half Navajo Stormwalker, who has special abilities and powers tied with the constant storms that move past her small town. She controls the elements that make up storms: lightning, rain, flooding, a power that can overwhelm her without the help of her former boyfriend, Mick, who is able to ground her. She finds herself in Magellan, AZ renovating an old hotel near the Navajo Nation where she was raised. She moved to the small town to assist in the investigation of the disappearance of the Police Chief's daughter. Things start to go really wonky when her ex boyfriend Mick finds her, her mother (the goddess of Beneath) continues to entice her to join her evil forces, and the mystery of the PC's daughter's disappearance unravels.

I love the Native American (Diné) mythology that is tied in with the characters and storyline. Janet is a really strong heroin from the get-go, but the secondary characters are just as strong and compelling. The skin-walkers and how they are portrayed as nasty ugly rotting things are different from any other book I've read. The star of the book in my opinion is the lecherous magic mirror! He steals every scene he is in! And Coyote, a Native American trickster god, is also front and center in the story and he is a great addition to the magical cast. Then there is Sheriff Nash who is über rigid and determined to be an unbeliever, you just have to love him no matter how much trouble he makes for Janet. Janet's ex-boyfriend, Mick, is determined to rekindle their relationship and is smokin hot. The tension between the two is fantastic. He is a very powerful magic user, but for most of the book Janet doesn't know what kind. I love how much we discover about him, he is a very yummy alpha male hero, just the way I like `em!

Stormwalker is a fun debut to a series I definitely will keep reading. The full cast of characters are wonderfully dimensional and the heavy Diné lore is well-done. The plot itself could have been stronger, there was not anything really new in the who-dun-it department, but the mystery and drama were still plentiful. The awesome characters and fantastic world-building most definitely left me wanting more! I am immediately moving on to the second book in the series, Firewalker, to see what happens next.

This is a wonderful start to a series. Never a dull moment and it has a lot going in-between less than 400 pages. Having said that, it was a joy to read and it did not feel too convoluted or contrived. Throughout the book I found it had many similarities to a couple of series that I have read previously. Two being the Weather Warder & Walker Papers. This however, was much more interesting than the Walker Papers. Complete high marks, this is a must read. I will be definitely be looking out for this author in the future.

it's always a good time to passs reading books like this. My regret is that is difficult to have an italian translation but sometimes is more interesting reading in english