“Something has the Upper Level demons afraid enough that they’ve all gone into hding.” Nicolai was speaking again. “And that something is killing us – killing Wardens.”
Hey everybody, did you hear? Some joyless busybody tried to get a librarian arrested over a young adult book. I think that sounds like a recommendation, don’t you? Let’s see what the fuss is all about.
Storm and Fury is the first book in a fantasy trilogy that’s a spin-off from Jennifer Armentrout’s “The Dark Elements” series. The series takes place in a world where humanity has recently been made aware that gargoyles are real: foot soldiers in a war between angels and demons. And right in the middle of this conflict is Trinity, a seemingly normal human 18-year-old who’s been raised among gargoyles and who has a secret in her blood that no one outside her immediate family can know about, because it would be like ringing the dinner bell to every demon in the world. And she wouldn’t even be allowed to go into battle if that happened, because her number one priority is supposed to be staying safe, even at the cost of the people she cares about.
That was what I’d done, time and time before, in different situations, and all of them had ended the same way.
Me without a scratch and someone else dead.
Some of the characters who appear in Storm and Fury already had major roles in “The Dark Elements” series, but you don’t need to worry about being left behind if you start here. Armentrout sets the scene quickly and gives the reader all the information they need about the Wardens (shape-shifting gargoyles who live in their own walled compounds) and the demons (an ever-increasing number of monsters, from the four-legged cannon fodder to the terrifying Upper Level demons that call the shots), and Trinity herself.
At eighteen years old, Trinity is a satisfyingly resilient character. She’s got the typical teenage impatience with things like “common sense” and “rules”, but you can give her some slack because she’s dealing with a lot: the death of her mother a year ago, something which we don’t get a lot of details about right away, and which she firmly believes was her fault. The genetic condition that means she’s slowly but inevitably going blind (a condition which the author shares, more on that later), which really clashes with her destiny to go bravely into battle…eventually. Her ability to see ghosts and spirits, leading to her occasionally having to talk some confused specter into letting go and walking into the light (there’s a throwaway comment about what that was like when it was a very young ghost who had a horrifying death, and it’s truly harrowing).
On top of all of that she has to pretend to be a normal human teenager who isn’t both an assent and a liability, while also having a lot of normal human teenager problems, like teenage boys, and wanting independence, and that incredibly hot Warden, Zayne, visiting from the DC clan. (Described as being blond with high cheekbones, I’m picturing Tom Hiddleston in this role. You’re welcome.)
Armentrout’s writing is a smorgasbord of senses. She’s equally good at sketching out a scene of hand-to-hand comment in exact detail, or a DC apartment, or a demon’s mansion where the residents are indulging in an evening of movies, popcorn, and a pillow fort (you heard me). There are emotional metaphors all over the shop; everything is narrated by Trinity, and she never goes with a simple description of what she’s feeling when a visual or tactile image will do: “curiosity bubbled to life”, “excitement thrummed through my veins”, “irritation flared to life like a lit match”. There are lots of tiny details thrown in that help to set the scene; what Zayne smells like, a skirt flaring around Trinity’s ankles as she turns, keys thrown onto a countertop as someone strides into the room, what it looks like when a living tattoo rises off of its wearer and launches across the room, the comfortable bickering between Trinity and her bonded Warden Misha, and the less comfortable but definitely-leading-to-something bickering between Trinity and Zayne.
And yes it’s a trope, but it’s an effectively done trope here, where Zayne and Trinity get on each other’s last nerve from the second they meet, so you already know the heavy make-out scene between them in chapter 29 is pretty much inevitable.
So, let’s get to the elephant in the room: the book’s sexual content. The aforementioned make-out scene is very steamy, two legal adults who have had an irresistible attraction that they’ve been trying to resist for at least three hundred pages. Is it something that might require an honest and open conversation between parents and their teenage children? Sure. Is it pornography? I really don’t think so. If virginity is something you think is important then good news! Trinity is – spoilers – still an eighteen-year-old virgin by the end of the book.
Anyone who thinks this sort of content would be traumatizing to a seventeen-year-old has obviously forgotten what it was like to be seventeen. Remember running on angst and hormones, wondering if love is something that will ever actually happen for you, and then getting to see a part of yourself in a character in a book and find out that what you’re feeling is something that has to be navigated with care but is also utterly normal? And there are so many passages that aren’t related to sex but are something a teenager could get some value from. The fact that someone has concerns about their children’s reading material doesn’t bother me, it’s that it’s so obvious the people who tried to get someone arrested over it means they didn’t read anything else.
“Maybe one day there’ll be a cure and it will work for me, but until then, I have to accept this and I can’t dwell on it, because it is scary – it’s scary as Hell to really think that all of this will be gone and I’ll have to learn to live differently with the expectations of who I am and what I am, but I have to deal with it. And I do so by not letting it define me or consume every waking moment of my life.
Armentrout uses her real-life experience with a degenerative eye disease to paint a picture of how it feels to have that hanging over your head, and then still make a life for yourself. She also shows what it’s like to have beliefs challenged; Trinity knows for an absolute fact at the start of the book that all demons are evil and destructive, and then has to reshape what she believes in response to what she learns, even if it’s counter to what the people she cares about have been telling her.
There’s also a lot to be learned from just how confusing relationships are, when you’re not 100% sure how you feel, much less how an impossibly desirable person feels about you, because of course there’s people they must like so much better, and maybe they only feel sorry about you, and why do people insist on thinking – even though your entire world has changed and your heart has been stomped on – that there’s such as thing as “going back to the way things were before”? Even Trinity’s uncomfortable experience with a make-out session gone wrong at the beginning of the book has something to teach. Most people might not have Trinity’s physical ability to deal with a hormonal teenage boy who’s slow to recognize the word “stop”, but it’s helpful to know that the whiplash-inducing switch from “but you were enjoying it” to “pfft, you’re not that hot anyway” is such a transparent punishment for setting a boundary.
So as you can imagine, this is not a light-and-fluffy young adult novel. There’s violence, and betrayal, and the kinds of arguments where you try to get ahead of the other person hurting you by saying the worst thing you can imagine first. But it’s a fun novel too, with very cool fights against an enemy that can teleport and fly (and is also naked, leading to back-and-forth dialog about how it would be great if someone would stop pointing out how naked it is), and a drama-queen ghost who’s also Trinity’s roommate, and a well-developed world with it’s own fascinating set of rules, and arguments about whether someone was “hiding” behind a curtain or just “partially obscured”. And yes, there’s a will they/won’t they romance that’s entertaining, even though every reader probably already knows how it will turn out in the end.