Forgotten Storm by A.R. Vagnetti

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So the next book I picked up was Forgotten Storm by A.R. Vagnetti. This is the first in her Storm series and also her debut novel. I applied this read to Fall in Love for the starts with F prompt. This also covers the Bang in the Night Bingo prompts a shocking twist and bite me.

Nicole used to dream about a man named Logan that fulfilled all of her fantasies. Two years ago, the dreams ended. After being on the run for years, she is starting to feel an itch that she can't stop. Suddenly Logan shows up, not only is he real but he's a vampire. He brings Nicole's forgotten memories from her youth and soon she learns she's the key to a century-old prophecy to bring down her father, the vampire king Dimitri.

So, before we get into my thoughts on the book, I want to talk about how I found this. A.R. Vagnetti is actually a friend of my Aunt Rowie! She came to town a couple months ago for a high school reunion and we were able to see each other a couple days. One night we were talking about books and when she heard I read paranormal romance she said her friend writes it. She also said it had sex (and that she skipped it since there was so much), but I didn't mind. I immediately bought the first book and added the other three books to my cart. The paperback was actually cheaper than the eBook, so I ended up buying a copy of it. When I was looking through my long tbr on goodreads for books that started with F and were paranormal or adjacent, I totally had spaced about this book. Which is crazy because I had reorganized my paranormal and fantasy shelves the day before.

I didn't know too much before going into this outside of it being too steamy for my aunt. I have to say, I liked it. Now, it was good and I liked a lot of the elements. The writing style was a little odd to me. I'm not sure what exactly it was, but sometimes I would just think, that was an odd transition. Even though I though it was good, it wasn't quite as engaging. It was very easy for me to put it down. I just wasn't quite as pulled into the story as normally happens. Once the plot starting really going I was expecting to be a little more engaged, but there were some choices made by the character that kept pushing things back. There are quite a few things I can get nitpicky about. The biggest issue I had though is that it felt a little over plotted. There were almost too many twists and/or setbacks and character points. I feel like it needed paring down a little bit. That is an issue I've seen before from indie-published author debuts. They just aren't quite there to self-edit for streamlining of the plot and want to just throw everything but the kitchen sink into their book. This led to me disliking Nicole the further we got in the book. When we got to the big battle at the end, I almost didn't really care if she made it through or not. It was a solid 4-stars for a debut novel, but some choices started getting made around the 200 pages mark that I think I'm going to drop it to a 3.5 and just round up on goodreads. I just wasn't emotionally invested in the book overall.

I'll definitely pick up the other books. I'm super sad that one character I wanted a book for ended up dying in the battle. There were some teaser for other couples. I also want to see how she grows as an author. There's a lot of good and unique world building here, I just wish that it was more engaging. We'll see when I pick up the next one!

Have you read Forgotten Storm?

Bookishly Yours,

Stasi🍎

STATISTICS: Forgotten Storm, A.R. Vagnetti, 4-stars, 3 days, paperback, 312 pages, published in 2020