I Will Send Rain by Rae Meadows – 272 pages

Book Blurb:

Annie Bell can’t escape the dust. It’s in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, in the corners of her children’s dry, cracked lips. It’s 1934 and the Bell farm in Mulehead, Oklahoma is struggling as the earliest storms of The Dust Bowl descend. All around them the wheat harvests are drying out and people are packing up their belongings as storms lay waste to the Great Plains. As the Bells wait for the rains to come, Annie and each member of her family are pulled in different directions. Annie’s fragile young son, Fred, suffers from dust pneumonia; her headstrong daughter, Birdie, flush with first love, is choosing a dangerous path out of Mulehead; and Samuel, her husband, is plagued by disturbing dreams of rain.

My Review: 4 stars

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I Will Send Rain is a story of a family growing together and apart during the devastating first years of the Dust Bowl. If my memory serves, I don’t recall reading a novel so well written about this awful time when nature took its toll so destructively. The author does a wonderful job of portraying the black clouds of dust that descended on the plains of Oklahoma, in every crack and every crevice. The heat, the drought and the dust took lives, livestock, crops, harvests, birds and insects. Those who stayed were heroic.

Annie’s family is in disarray- one mute son, one rebellious teen daughter and a husband who takes comfort in prayer to see them through. She is pulled in a direction that is self-serving as her family is breaking. With a betrayal in her midst and an overwhelming sense of loss for what could’ve been versus what she thought she wanted, we see a flawed character come into her own.

In general, characters were wonderfully multi-faceted and perfectly fleshed out. I found the son’s wisdom, though he had no voice, to be remarkable. Birdie, the teen daughter, is so relatable and entirely representative of a sixteen year old in love. Samuel, who finds the church as the only reason for salvation, was a loving and strong man who clearly had a vision. Even the minor characters played important roles in defining the major character’s POVs.

I highly recommend this book for discussion. Definitely will be a favorite from 2016.

Quotes I liked:

How thrilling it was to feel this way, rattled by his mere presence, wanting only to give in to his pull. But desire was awful, too, full of trapdoors and sharp hooks.”

-“Maybe God posted signs visible only to those with eyes to see. She wasn’t one of them, but she could accept that maybe her husband was.”

-“We know everyone we love is going to die, but we don’t know it, can’t possibly believe it, she thought, or long ago I would have gone and started digging until I had a hole big enough to lie down in.”

-“But hers had been a family of hidden feelings, held tongues.”

-“Desperation, he knew, though, was not something you make a plan for.”

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