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A luminous, tenderly rendered novel of a woman fighting for her family's survival in the early years of the Dust Bowl; from the acclaimed and award-winning Rae Meadows.
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.
As Annie, desperate for an escape of her own, flirts with the affections of an unlikely admirer, she must choose who she is going to become. With her warm storytelling and beautiful prose, Rae Meadows brings to life an unforgettable family that faces hardship with rare grit and determination. Rich in detail and epic in scope, I Will Send Rain is a powerful novel of upheaval and resilience, filled with hope, morality, and love.
"Starred Review. [A] vibrant, absorbing novel that stays with the reader." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. An exceptional talent for creating vivid imagery and a tender regard for her characters mark Meadows' new novel... Similar to John Steinbeck's haunting portrait of tenant farmers in The Grapes of Wrath, but also with the gritty, bittersweet elements in Rilla Askew's Harpsong (2007) and the poignant lyricism of Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust (1997)." - Booklist
"Starred Review. In her fourth novel, Meadows's (Mercy Train) lyrical and descriptive writing evokes a harsh landscape of dust, bones, and abandoned homes...The unforgettable characters show grit, determination, and brokenness in equal measure." - Library Journal
"There's a relentless quality to the novel, and it can almost seem too grim, especially at the end. But there are saving graces in the form of powerful writing and memorable characters who are hard to shake off even after you've read the last page." - Kirkus
"Rae Meadows' I Will Send Rain is as lush and powerful as the novel's Dust Bowl setting is dry and cracked - Meadows paints the Bell family's desperation with compassion and warmth, and her precise language turns grit into gold." - Emma Straub
"I Will Send Rain is meticulously researched, deeply felt, and beautifully written, and I loved immersing myself in its harsh and elegant world." - Curtis Sittenfeld
"In I Will Send Rain you'll find compassion, heartbreak, and not a word out of place. Meadows shares with John Steinbeck not just a gigantic empathy but a gigantic storytelling gift. This is a novel where love and laughter abide." - Darin Strauss
This information about I Will Send Rain was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Jefferson Wheeler
In addition to Mothers & Daughters (2011, published in paperback as Mercy Train), Rae Meadows is the author of Calling Out, which received the 2006 Utah Book Award for fiction, and No One Tells Everything, a Poets & Writers Notable Novel. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Brooklyn, New York.
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