If It Rains
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15
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Average rating1
A story of resilience and redemption set against one of America's defining moments--the Dust Bowl. It's 1935 in Oklahoma, and lives are determined by the dust. Fourteen-year-old Kathryn Baile, a spitfire born with a severe clubfoot, is coming of age in desperate times. Once her beloved older sister marries, Kathryn's only comfort comes in the well-worn pages of her favorite book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Then Kathryn's father decides to relocate to Indianapolis, and only the promise of a surgery to finally make her "normal" convinces Kathryn to leave Oklahoma behind. But disaster strikes along the way, and Kathryn must rely on her grit and the ragged companions she meets on the road if she is to complete her journey. Back in Boise City, Melissa Baile Mayfield is the newest member of the wealthiest family in all of Cimarron County. In spite of her poor, rural upbringing, Melissa has just married the town's most eligible bachelor and is determined to be everything her husband--and her new social class--expects her to be. But as the drought tightens its grip, Henry's true colors are revealed. Melissa covers her bruises with expensive new makeup and struggles to reconcile her affluent life with that of her starving neighbors. Haunted by the injustice and broken by Henry's refusal to help, Melissa secretly defies her husband, risking her life to follow God's leading. Two sisters, struggling against unspeakable hardship, discover that even in their darkest times, they are still united in spirit, and God is still with them, drawing them home.
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First off, I felt like the intro raised too many questions and that I was thrown into the middle of the action without any of the directions known. It was a shocking entry into the characters' lives and there were obviously tons of things going on that were told because the story was too busy showing the scene at hand to explain anything. Then a girl in emotional turmoil simply goes and settles in to read a book....is she some sort of psychopath, to just shrug off trauma like it never happened, and to just sigh and go read her book in peace after a fast-paced scene of premature birth? It did not give me a good connection to the MC from the very beginning.
Next comes a detailed, explicit sex scene in a Christian book. Detailed, but only halfway? She drops her dress but somehow she'd not been wearing any underwear? In the 1920s? And then it describes more detail than a 1990s secular romance. First, that's not appropriate for a book marketed to a general audience commonly read by girls around 13, especially since one of the sisters is 14 and it would be of interest to casual readers browsing shelves because of that. Second–it's very heavyhanded foreshadowing of the unrelenting marital abuse that follows. This is within a generation of the Victorian era. A sheltered girl wouldn't really take alarm at that behaviour and wouldn't find any sympathy in the women around her; her mother's era was the “lie still and think of Scotland” era.
Then he begins to force her to wear makeup etc. I found it really unrealistic of how quickly she took alarm because few starry-eyed girls recognize the symptoms of abuse that fast.
Kathryn is a snotty nosed brat and Melissa is a frustrating mix of naive and injured. I expected from the synopsis that I would be 100% on Melissa's side but honestly her husband is such a caricature that he didn't even seem real.
I can't make it to the end, but I decided to go ahead and post my review because I would hate for some girl to run across a sex scene like this by accident. The shock value writing and the stereotyped characters/unexpected character actions and emotions made me think more of a Steinbeck novel than a representation of average middle America in the Depression.
My star system–if I can't finish the book because of issues in the book, that's an automatic one star “was not okay” rating
