meteorology, Australia, Australian-author, Australians, lightning, camping, m/m-romance, made-me-smarter, contemporary-romance, storm-chasers, weather-phenomena*****

Tully is an outdoorsman who relishes his time out in Kakadu National Park in the northern tip of his homeland, even when he has to take scientists along so they can do their studies. Jeremiah is a very buttoned-down city nerd/meteorologist who wants to field study lightning for personal reasons. Then things get REAL personal!
Meanwhile I got to learn a lot about that part of Australia and its fantastic weather phenomena!
Glen LLoyd is and excellent Aussie voice actor and perfect in this context. ( )

This little novel is perfect, and the start to a new series, The Storm Boys - so more to come.

It's such a fun relationship development between Tully, the wild boy of Kakadu, the national park southeast of Darwin, and Jeremiah, the fulminologist - an academic who studies lightning - from Melbourne.

The elation of finding someone interested in your work and passion. And someone who has the interest and intelligence and curiosity to join you in it. That gives this little novel a joyful exuberance. As does the character of the cheeky, bold, ever cheerful Tully.

The adventure, the Kakadu setting, the isolation, the storms .. there's a lot of powerful background that might otherwise dominate this story, but the energy that pours out of Tully at the excitement of unearthing (no pun intended) Jeremiah - that's what's electric.

The dialogue is fantastic, even though I found it a little hard to believe.

I've read a few NR Walker novels now (7), starting with the Red Dirt series, read by Joel Leslie. I found those books a bit wacky, and Joel Leslie's reading overdone, I've had to change my mind thoroughly about NR Walker, as everything I've read since Red Dirt, ie 5 books, have been surprisingly good.

And Joel Leslie is ok when he's not trying for the Australian accent, so I don't hesitate to listen to a book if he is the narrator.

NR Walker has written dozens of books - close to 100 are mentioned on Thing - I can't believe the name is not known among any of my reading acquaintances.

Glen Lloyd narrates this series. He manages to give Tully and Jeremiah distinct enough voices that I didn't get confused too often, as to who was speaking. I fact I thought the title description had failed to mention one of the voice actors, as it's more usual that two different narrators are assigned for each of the leads. ( )