Rainwater

This is another wonderful Sandra Brown book! The story revolves around a woman who ran a boarding house and a gentleman who came to stay there as he was dying. Mr. Rainwater was a good man who did not like racism and this was prevalent in the time this book was written. Ella and Mr Rainwater fell in love. Ella had a son who was terribly disabled, could not talk, and had violent fits yet with patience, Mr. Rainwater was able to get through to Solly, the son The book took place during the great depression, people were poor, racism was rampant and violent things occurred but Mr. Rainwater and the good people in this Texas town were able to stand up and be counted. Rainwater died in jail protecting his love.

This novel is preceded by a preface in which the author explains that this book was written between her more usual novels blockbuster romantic suspense, that it simply couldnt go unwritten. After reading the book, I understand what she meant. The novel is set in Browns beloved Texas, but it is a novel of sweet, aching complexity. The heroine is the mother of an almost-ten-year-old autistic son, and the titular hero is a man dying of metastatic bone cancer. Brown tackles the 1930s unflinchingly, its toxic racism, and its dearth of knowledge about cancer treatment, autism, and more in a moving, subtle, and winsome way. As I read, I was reminded often of the classic western film The Shootist, which starred Lauren Bacall, as the proprietor of a boarding house, and an aging (and already ill himself) John Wayne, as a dying gunman who moves into the house to spend his final weeks of life. The similarities stop there: Bacalls characters son is a teenaged Ron Howard, who idolizes Waynes characters gunslinger past. In Browns novel, the hero has no such illustrious (or nefarious) past; he oversaw his fathers cotton empire prior to his cancer diagnosis. The connection between hero and heroine in the film is testy then tender, but it doesnt progress as the relationship between Ella and David does in the novel. Altogether, I recommend the novel as a bittersweet tale of the redemptive power of love. Brown manages the twists on the plotNew Deal government bailouts that involved culling starving herds of cattle, small town bullies, and ever-divisive racial tensionsdeftly and cleverly. Although this is not a typical Brown novel, it is in my opinion worth reading on every level.

First, to the one star reviewer who said the author never revealed who the man in the shop was. Of course she did, and it was part of what made the ending so much better. I just read this for the first time today. I purchased this book four years ago, but it sat on my Kindle because in my mind, I love Sandra Brown but not as an author of historicals. I can remember reading the Grapes of Wrath and having my parents, who were married and lived through that time (I was a late baby) telling me that the book was so very true to life. That the government failed as many people as the stock market and weather did. I have spoken to friends of my grandparents who were trying to raise their kids in the early 1934 and 1935. So I began reading the book knowing a lot about a time I didn\’t live in. Sandra Brown didn\’t either but she sure knows how to bring it to life. Through half of the book I was smiling and the other half I was crying. I hope she writes more from this time period because nothing missed her keyboard – not the despair, the loneliness, the racism, the hatred, the hopelessness of those days. But she also captured the love, the caring. I loved Rainwater himself and Ella was an interesting woman, and very much cut from the fabric of those times. I suspect the one and two star reviews are because people didn\’t understand that time. It wasn\’t a case of \’why don\’t they just give the cows to the people who needed them\’ before the government could shoot them\’, it was because the program that paid them for those dead cows was the only way they survived. The ONLY way. Just a story from 1934. My parents lived in a house they owned and my father stayed working that entire decade. My mother raised chickens, and yes to his dying day, my father really wasn\’t a fan of chickens. Their house wasn\’t too far from the railroad tracks and my mother would feed the hobos. I asked her once why she wasn\’t afraid, she told me that those men were so downtrodden that a simple thing like a meal made them feel better about themselves. And the chickens? Because the family next door to them were nearly starving, she would \”accidentally\” chop the heads off two chickens instead of one, and take the spare to the neighbors. So yes, Sandra Brown really did get it.

Rainwater is the best novel I\’ve read in a long time. The storyline captured me from the beginning and held my interest till the very last page. Sandra Brown has a unique writing technique that made the characters feel genuine and the story actually happened. My husband prefers biographies but I urged him to read it and he had the same conclusion as me. Kudos Sandra Brown!

I loved this story, this woman who worked so hard to be so independent and to love her son unconditionally and the many that came along to prove that he was willing to do whatever was necessary in the time he had left to help her and her son in anyway he could. Sacrifice and love and the outcome following. Mr Rainwater, we could sure use a lot more men like you in this world.

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