Storm: It’s a Curse to Remember by Gurpreet Kaur Sidhu

Storm: It’s a Curse to Remember is Book One in a series but can be read as a standalone novel and is a thriller which deals with past lives.

Evan Storm wakes up with terrible nightmares every morning about a past life where he is an abusive husband. He and his sister are orphans, and his psychic grandmother raised them from when they were small. Evan has just met his new neighbour Shadow Hex, and is shocked to find that she is the reincarnation of his abused wife from his previous life. Evan feels a bond with her and knows immediately that he must protect her at all costs. What Evan doesn’t know is that there is a secret agency out there that deals with problems for wealthy clients and that one of their agents, Marvin, used to be engaged to Shadow. Marvin wants her back and will use everything in his arsenal, which could include getting rid of Evan or anyone in his life. Can you fight against one who actually doesn’t exist? Evan’s sister Denise has her own problems, as her husband was in an accident and has lost 7 years of memories, including the knowledge that he has a son. Is there a happy ending in anyone’s future?

The story had a good idea behind it, but a lot of things let it down. Firstly the formatting was completely out. Letters of words were divided up between lines and many words had no spaces between them. Some pages had lines between paragraphs and other pages had paragraphs which just ran into each other.  Sometimes the word order was incorrect and other times there were prepositions missing which changed the meaning of the sentence. The paragraphs were filled with head hopping and you could get multiple POV’s in a paragraph (including in some instances the POV of a cat). The only tie-in I could see with Denise’s story was the parallel between memories lost in her family, while Evan is struggling with more memories than most in his. Otherwise, the two parts don’t fit together at all and indeed have no impact on each other. Without giving away too much, the ending was very strange for me. Many past life memories are brought in which have no bearing on any of the current characters and actually make the ending more confusing. The intense fear of the agency and the build-up to a confrontation fizzles out and I hope that some of the character’s paths are expanded on more in the next book.

A story with past lives interfering with present ones as well as secret agencies with evil agendas does sound intriguing, but the story needs work to make it more coherent. I had to remove stars for the editing and formatting as well as for the storyline which left me hanging. I wish the author well and hope that she continues and grows in her writing.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to review the book.