If It Rains

 

This is not a book to be enjoyed.  It is a book to be consumed, deliberated over, and digested at length.  There aren't many light-hearted moments to be had in this book, but it is a story that needs to be told and retold.  Taking place in Boise City, Oklahoma, and during the dust bowl era, If It Rains chronicles the story of two sisters caught in untenable situations that move the reader to strong emotions and even stronger reactions.  

Melissa has married into the leading family of the town, but her marriage isn't all it's cracked up to be. Her new husband shows his true colors the very first night of their marriage and becomes worse as the plot moves on.  The only reason he married her was to get her father to sell him his land because it has the only water source in the area, but soon after that, the water dries up, just like the rest of the county.  That only makes Melissa's husband even angrier. 

Kathryn is Melissa's younger sister and was born with a club foot, and she can only walk with the use of a leg brace. When their father sells the land, Kathryn, her father, and his second wife decide to go to Indianapolis to live with the wife's father, a doctor, who can help with Kathryn's foot.  Along the way, Kathryn gets lost in a dust storm and gets left behind.  She has to make her own way to Indianapolis, surviving on her wits and the kindness of strangers.  Once she makes it to Indianapolis, Kathryn finds that her step-mother deliberately left her in a ditch to die during that dust storm.  

These characters demonstrate resiliency, dogged determination, and a grasp of life that won't be let go.  Melissa is not content to pay lip service to the Christian charities of her church, but works to make a difference if only in one life. The power her husband has in the community makes it hard for her to truly live it out, but she does the best she can to help and befriend one woman who is living hand to mouth with five children to feed.  Kathryn finds within herself the power to lead her own life under her own terms with her own strengths--especially after finding strength she didn't know she had. 

Jennifer L Wright has taken pages from a history book and put them into a format that the average reader can understand and empathize.  The Dust Bowl Era was an especially hard time of American History especially due to the already depressed economy and the lack of understanding what conserving the land really meant.  Reading books like this helps readers to understand the hard-scrabble life people had during this bleak time of history.  In fact, this book puts me in mind of a classic John Steinbeck novel, The Grapes of Wrath, and could be considered on a par with that book.  

Five Stars. 

Tyndale House and NetGalley.com provided the copy I read for this review.  All opinions expressed are solely my own.