I Will Send Rain
2018 Longlist

I Will Send Rain

ABOUT
THE BOOK

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.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Rae
Meadows

Rae Meadows is the author of Calling Out, which received the 2006 Utah Book Award for fiction, No One Tells Everything, a Poets and Writers Notable Novel, and the widely praised novel, Mercy Train. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Brooklyn, New York.

Rae Meadows is the author of Calling Out, which received the 2006 Utah Book Award for fiction, No One Tells Everything, a Poets and Writers Notable Novel, and the widely praised novel, Mercy Train. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Brooklyn, New York.

NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS

Rae Meadow’s I Will Send Rain was a finalist of the 2017 Oklahoma Book Awards. The novel relates the impact of ecological disasters on a family unit as well as society as a whole. It is relevant today as local communities and nations deal with climate change and global warming.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Date published
09/08/2016
Author
Publisher
Henry Holt and Company

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