Reviewer: Sandy
Elise Stephens is now on tour with CLP Blog Tours and Forecast
Summary:
Calvin isn’t a teenager, not really; instead, he’s spent his life trying to protect his mother and sister from his alcoholic father. Calvin keeps a knife close and sleeps with one eye open, even years after his father has left the family. A summer vacation spent at their late grandfather’s estate promises him and his sister the chance to leave their problems behind.
Instead of blissful freedom, they find the old house harbors secrets at every turn, like a mysterious stone door in the forest with rumored powers to give its entrants the gift of future-seeing. When Calvin faces the return of his seemingly-reformed father, he throws himself through the door to receive the gift of foresight. But the door offers more doubt than certainty, and the future he sees is riddled with disturbing confusion. With a revenge-obsessed lawyer hunting him down and a secret society out to control him, Calvin must figure out how to stop what he’s started before he loses what he holds most dear.
As he battles the legacies of his past and the shadows of his future, Calvin must accept help from unlikely sources, give trust he never thought possible, and learn that the greatest challenges lie not in the things to come, but in the present moment.
Review:
Calvin is a curious fifteen-year old teen and who wouldn’t be as he walks inside a massive old house that is just begging to unleash its mysteries. When his twin sister and he decided to visit his ancestral home before starting the school year, they didn’t anticipate uncovering the secrets their family had hidden from them. His grandfather, a psychic, the one and only Percy Humboldt was a foreseer of things to come and had a great following before his death. His housekeeper, Mrs. Seabrook, who manages the Humboldt Manor, has a great knowledge of the things of the past, for which she slowly passes onto the two teens as they investigate the Manor. It’s his study that intrigues Calvin and for which Calvin finds the most valuable information which will transform both of their lives forever. His twin Cleo putts around in the garden for garden bulbs where she unmistakably discovers the key. This key which was to remain hidden has now fallen into the hands of the twins and now the intensity of this book is skyrocketing. This key is like a time bomb, people want it and others think it is cursed; I’m torn between what are sinister ways and just curiosity. I cheered for both sides, I wanted to open the locked door with the key and I wanted to be on the other side of the door and figure out why it was locked. I wanted to see what was there and experience it yet as I read the words that grandfather left for them in his letters, I was chilled and I feared for them but I wanted it all the same. Once you have the power that grandfather talked about, you can’t turn it off and like their grandfather the twins wanted to know, they wanted to see if it was real. As grandfather begs them to destroy the key, he tells them about his life, his family and the VisumOris organization. So many sides and different stories, just who do you believe? It’s only a key and a door, right?
5 stars
Author Bio: Elise Stephens received the Eugene Van Buren Prize for Fiction from the University of Washington in 2007. Forecast is her second novel. Her first novel Moonlight and Oranges was a quarter-finalist for the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Her short fiction has appeared in the Unusual Stories anthology, as well as in multiple journals.
Get your copy of The Lost Eyes, the prequel to Forecast for just 99 cents!
A quest in the vein of Indiana Jones filled with intrigue, romance, ancient ruins, and a race against time.
