“I am as blank as a piece of white paper in a world with no pencils.”

Did I miss something? Did I read a different version of Still Life With Tornado than everyone else? Because I hated this book.
I hated Sarah.
I hated Umbrella.
I didn’t like the magical realism aspect of having multiple Sarahs that everyone could see despite every other aspect of the book being set in a realistic world.
The Art Club/ Miss Smith story line had nothing to do with the big reveal! Was it even really resolved, or just there?
The “pay off” at the end was not enough to put up with the constant repeating that “nothing is original” and that “everything is Art.”

I stayed the course with this one because it was well reviewed but I just do. not. get. it.

This is the plot as copied from Amazon: Sixteen-year-old Sarah can’t draw. This is a problem, because as long as she can remember, she has “done the art.” She thinks she’s having an existential crisis. And she might be right; she does keep running into past and future versions of herself as she wanders the urban ruins of Philadelphia. Or maybe she’s finally waking up to the tornado that is her family, the tornado that six years ago sent her once-beloved older brother flying across the country for a reason she can’t quite recall. After decades of staying together “for the kids” and building a family on a foundation of lies and domestic violence, Sarah’s parents have reached the end. Now Sarah must come to grips with years spent sleepwalking in the ruins of their toxic marriage. As Sarah herself often observes, nothing about her pain is remotely original—and yet it still hurts.

I can’t add anything to that summary other than I really, really, really disliked this book.