After reading Phoebe Wilby’s Storms, I found myself holding a bittersweet kind of admiration for the raw and emotionally-charged journey she’s captured through the eyes of young Annie Ryan. This novel is a coming-of-age memoir wrapped in the chaos of a family road trip across Australia in the 1970s. It begins with a Christmas promise, the anticipation of a trampoline, which unravels into a year-long caravan trek brought on not by choice, but by a father’s authoritarian rule. Told through the lens of an eight-year-old girl, the book balances nostalgia and grief, humor and heartbreak, and manages to say quite a bit about resilience, fractured families, and the loss of innocence.

I was immediately struck by how honest and unfiltered Annie’s voice felt. There’s a heartbreaking tension between her childlike enthusiasm and the creeping understanding that not everything is fair or safe in her world. The writing is straightforward, sometimes poetic, but never pretentious. Wilby captures the complexities of a blended family, especially one hiding behind the thin veneer of normalcy, with such brutal clarity that at times I had to put the book down and just sit with the weight of it. Some parts were hard to read, especially the subtle and not-so-subtle dynamics of control, silence, and emotional neglect. Still, Annie’s wit and insight cut through the darkest moments, making her impossible not to root for.

At times, the pacing slowed, especially in the middle of the journey, but it somehow worked, mirroring the long and exhausting nature of the trip itself. What carried me through was the deeply personal way Wilby described everything: the weather, the landscape, the moods, the subtle shifts in family dynamics. Her use of metaphor, especially around storms both literal and emotional, felt ike something she’d been carrying a long time. I felt angry. I laughed. I felt sad. That kind of emotional whiplash is rare and a sign of good storytelling.

Storms is not fast or flashy. It doesn’t wrap anything up neatly. But if you’ve ever grown up feeling like a bystander in your own family, or if you’ve ever carried the weight of being too old for your age, this book will resonate with you. I’d recommend it for readers who love memoir-style fiction, who want something thoughtful and real, who don’t mind a few emotional bruises along the way.

Pages: 496 | ISBN: 0473721279