Rainwater by Sandra Brown

Sandra Brown already has quite a pedigree, as the writer of nearly two dozen thrillers, several of them New York Times bestsellers.

With Rainwater she is attempting something very different from her standard yarn. This occurs with some regularity among writers who are very well-established and successful in one specific genre (the John Grishams and Stephen Kings): burning away in the brain is an idea for another story entirely, and one which may not appeal to their existing fan base.

Brown writes in the preface to Rainwater that she wrote this on the sly – she was working on two other contracted books at the time, and none of her business associates were aware of this little project, so she submitted the finished manuscript with trepidation, conscious of its difference to her previous work and uncertain about how it would be received.

She needn’t have feared. Rainwater is a very special story, an addictive tale that is beautifully constructed and above all very readable. The story of what happens to a lonely single mother when a mysterious new lodger arrives at her boarding house in Depression-era Texas, I drank it up in two evenings, and I suspect even the most time-poor would be reluctant to stretch out their reading much further than that – the characterization and plot are so strong that you simply must find out the fates of the people that sneak into your heart.

At the novel’s opening, Ella Barron’s lodgers are two elderly spinster sisters and a travelling salesman. Ella has an autistic young son, Solly, but with autism not yet identified as a medical condition, Solly is generally viewed as the town idiot. Ella lives with the fear that if he behaves strangely in public, he may be taken from her and placed in one of the many nightmarish facilities for the mentally ill.

She has an orderly, proscribed, regimented life until one day the local doctor introduces a young man, Mr Rainwater, who is looking to board in one of her rooms. Ella, who for her own safety has become highly attuned to the hidden and unspoken, knows something is up, and learns that Mr Rainwater is terminally ill with only months to live.

It’s the perfect set-up for a poignant love story, and Brown doesn’t disappoint – she draws out the tension beautifully and steers clear of the melodrama and sentimentality that can turn a strong premise into soupy treacle.

One of my favourite elements was Sandra Brown’s exploration of the history of this area, particularly in relation to a government-run cattle programme designed to boost the dire provincial economy. For many thousands of farmers, their businesses were no longer economically viable, so the government slaughtered their stock and paid them per head of cattle (curiously, the carcasses were thrown away, to be pursued by starving townspeople and slum-dwellers). Cleverly, Brown molds this historical datum into a tense plot development relating to a local sociopath who has unfinished business with Ella.

Rainwater is a rather literary novel in terms of its austerity and its refusal to give the reader the ending they might prefer, but despite the many sadnesses in the story, I found it hopeful, uplifting and quite unlike any other recent novel. However, in it’s blending of the historical and the personal, I suspect it will strike a chord with fans of Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 smash-hit The Help. Highly recommended.

4/5 Stars: More than just another historical love story.  Click here to listen to the Easy Mix Audio Review

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Today’s chat with guest host Susan Wood features a beautiful novel by an American novelist, Kathryn Stockett.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

In writing The Help, which is the story of black women servants and the white women they work for in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, Stockett drew on her own experience of growing up with a black maid who was treated like a member of her family. In this debut novel, Skeeter, a Jackson native, returns to her hometown fresh from an enlightening four years at university.

Skeeter is progressive, open-minded and tolerant – the other white women in the town, including her mother, are markedly less so. Skeeter, seeking a writing career through a New York publishing house, sets out to write a book filled with first-person accounts by black maids of their experiences serving the white families of Jackson. In doing so, they are risking everything, and the novel is taut with the tension this risk creates.

Jackson was a pivotal location in the US civil rights movement, and Stockett weaves into her fiction real events: Rosa Parks’ Montgomery bus boycott, lunch counter sit-ins, and the assassination by a white supremacist of activist Medgar Evers, a Jackson native. One of the most moving scenes in the book is that of a black family sitting around a radio, listening to coverage of the shooting of Evers, as his body lies in his driveway just streets away. They are too afraid to venture outside and risk being seen by white townsfolk.

At times in the novel, the depth of blacks’ fear will stun you, seem almost ridiculous, an overreaction to prejudice. But a particularly compelling passage – one cemented utterly in the gruesome fact of countless historical episodes – involving the consequences of a young black man using a whites-only bathroom, will remind you why the fear was justified. It’s a book revolving around women, but anyone with an interest in American history, and especially the history of race, should read it. (Warning: it will make you seriously question how Barack Obama ever ascended to the office of President.)

One Day by David Nicholls

The second review is of One Day, the latest novel from British writer David Nicholls, who moves on from the 20s-angst theme of his two earlier books (including Starter for 10, adapted into a film starring James McAvoy) with a jolly clever plot device that I had never before encountered. One Day follows the lives of Emma and David, who hooked up once on 15 July 1988 (the night of their graduation from university), by checking in with them every 15 July in each of the 20 years afterwards. Where are they? Who are they with? Are they in touch with each other or estranged? Are they meant to be together? What happens when they have to face the grown-up pressures of their 30s, and worse yet, their 40s?

It was rather reminiscent of the top-rating UK TV dramedy Cold Feet (which, incidentally, Nicholls appeared in during his earlier career as an actor), and having liked that show, I found One Day thoroughly engrossing. I desperately wanted to find out how it would all end, so I ripped through it in a couple of sittings – and was highly entertained along the way.