84 pages • 2 hours read
Roland SmithStorm Runners
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Number of Chapters and Chapter Titling
The book contains 39 chapters; each is short and easy to read. This helps increase the pace and gives the novel a page-turner feel: Readers will be tempted to read “just one more chapter,” and the book will seem to race along. Toward the end of the book, the chapters get shorter, which increases the sense of hurtling speed and an onrushing emergency.
Except for the first one, all chapters are titled with time stamps like “07:45AM,” which adds a note of urgency and tension to the novel’s flow. It suggests that the clock is ticking on the approaching storm, that things can happen in a hurry, and that every minute counts. The precise times also reflect Chase and John’s obsession with precision, especially in an emergency. Some chapters are only minutes apart, switching back and forth quickly between Chase’s group and John’s team as they converge on the same area. (The technique of titling chapters by sequential moments also appears in the popular middle grade novel about the American Revolutionary War, The Fighting Ground. A study guide for that book is available at SuperSummary.com.)
Cliffhangers
Many of the book’s chapters end as cliffhangers, dire situations that the characters must somehow escape. After each such thrill, the next chapter usually switches to a different set of characters and the problems they face. Shortly, the story shifts back to the cliffhanger and resolves it. The cliffhanger is a tried-and-true method used by adventure and thriller writers to keep the page-turning tension to a maximum.
The novel itself ends in a cliffhanger: Just as Chase, Nicole, and Rashawn return to the relative safety of the Rossi Circus headquarters, the hurricane picks up speed, floodwaters rise, an escaped leopard threatens, and the three kids must figure out what to do. With no more pages to turn, the reader must instead move on to the second volume of this three-part saga, The Surge.
Mary Sue Effect
Adventure stories sometimes contain protagonists who are impossibly good, competent, and attractive. Such a character is called a “Mary Sue,” in honor of the heroine of an early satire of the type. (Male versions are sometimes called “Marty Stu.”) In Storm Runners, the three main characters, Chase, Nicole, and Rashawn, come close to being Mary Sues, but the author wisely avoids making them insufferably perfect.
Nicole is a modified Mary Sue: She’s an A-student, champion swimmer, trained animal keeper, loving member of a circus family, calm and capable in an emergency, and very pretty—in short, she’s nearly perfect. However, she’s not quietly smug like most Mary Sue characters, and it’s worth noting that the book views her largely through Chase’s love-struck eyes.
A year or two younger than Chase and Nicole, Rashawn also displays some Mary Sue tendencies: She’s tall, strong, athletically trained, intelligent, observant, dedicated, determined, and lives on an animal sanctuary with a heroic father. However, she bursts into tears under stress, and she makes mistakes, so she’s not perfect, nor does she think she is. Chase, too, displays Marty Stu tendencies, given his smarts, advanced emergency-response training, and go-getter attitude, but he also worries a lot and sometimes does foolish things.
Thus, the main characters come close to but don’t step over the line of unreal perfection that spoils some adventure novels. The reader can enjoy their competence without feeling it’s too much.
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By Roland Smith
