Sarah has found herself suffering from a creative drought, with no motivation to draw or even go to school. She has no real friends, and nothing she draws feels creative enough. After dropping out of school and following a homeless artist in the hopes of recovering her motivation to draw, she meets ten-year-old Sarah. 

With the help of her younger self, she starts digging into a trip to Mexico that she can’t quite remember, after which her family splintered apart. Along the way, she finds out why her brother, who she formerly considered her best friend, moved away and never visited since, and she finds out why her parents are constantly arguing. Meanwhile, her mother grapples with the reality that Sarah has yet to face, while recovering from the aftermath of that fateful trip that broke apart their family. 

Still Life with Tornado chronicles the journey Sarah, her younger and older selves, and her family embark on to recover from the fallout of domestic violence and trauma. 

The story focuses on Sarah and her family recovering from their trauma, and the book focuses especially on Sarah’s character development as she slowly works out the truth about what happened with her family. I especially enjoyed reading about her relationship with her brother, Bruce, because it was a rather wholesome aspect that made the more upsetting chapters easier to read. 

The choice of incorporating multiple versions of Sarah, all of them different ages, worked to the story’s advantage - I rarely see books that have multiple versions of the main character but I generally enjoy seeing metaphors and ideas like that in writing. It particularly helped with present-day Sarah’s character development, as her ten-year-old self helps Sarah work out her past. I wish the older versions of Sarah appeared more often, as they appeared a few times briefly and then weren’t seen again until much later.

I did appreciate the dual narrating between Sarah and her mother, Helen. It provided a break from Sarah’s narration while giving insight into Helen’s struggles with her marriage. Helen’s chapters also provided some context as to what was going on in the chapters where ten-year-old Sarah narrates her past, which helped for me because at times I was a bit confused by the events transpiring. It also highlighted the impacts of domestic violence on a family from the point of view of someone suffering directly from it. 

The book focuses on self-discovery and moving past trauma, and often mentions domestic violence. There is some physical violence in the book, although not to a large degree. Ten-year-old Sarah lives in denial that domestic violence is occuring in her family, and a large portion of the book focuses on her present-day self gradually coming to terms with the impact her father’s abuse had on her family. 

I would give the book a 9/10 for a creative premise and tackling its subject matter in a sensitive yet direct way.