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Where When It Rains
Riley could have been a professional skateboarder if he hadn’t hit his head and woken from a coma with crippling vertigo. Trapped in Phoenix and hoping to pursue his passion from behind the lens, he accidentally lands in the orbit of a narcissistic model where he is captured by the glitz of parties, drugs, and sex. His new friends are equally without direction, and together they drift from night to night in an alcohol fueled hunt for meaning. When chance offers him a shot at real love - and a real life - Riley must find a way to escape not only the force of his routines, but the pull of world events that seem intent on destroying him.
Where When It Rains is a marvel of efficient prose and crisp dialogue from the award winning author of A Ballroom for Ghost Dancing. Perfectly capturing the bittersweet fire of youth, it takes the reader on a journey across a desert both physical and spiritual, demanding we confront the worst parts of ourselves while extending a hand of forgiveness all the same.
Where When It Rains is a marvel of efficient prose and crisp dialogue from the award winning author of A Ballroom for Ghost Dancing. Perfectly capturing the bittersweet fire of youth, it takes the reader on a journey across a desert both physical and spiritual, demanding we confront the worst parts of ourselves while extending a hand of forgiveness all the same.
- GenresFiction
302 pages, Paperback
Published December 3, 2024
1 person is currently reading
40 people want to read
About the author
John F. Duffy
2 books19 followersJohn F Duffy is the author of two novels and several works of short fiction. He lives in Indiana with his wife and daughter.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
July 17, 2025
I first heard about John Duffy and Picket Fire Press on the excellent Dad Lit Podcast and was intrigued enough to pick up a copy of this book. I was expecting it to be good, but was not expecting it to be one of the best novels I have read in years.
This is Hemingway with skaters and Myspace and the looming threat of the 2008 financial crisis - this last one expertly woven into the comparative microcosm of the story being told here. There are nods to The Sun Also Rises by way of character names. The Great Gatsby is also a spiritual ancestor. The sex and the moral torpor had Amazon recommending Michel Houellebecq to me next, but this is much better - and I actually like Houellebecq (sometimes, and against my better judgement).
It is a tale of aimless shallow twentysomethings drinking, f**king, and getting f**ked up as a means of avoiding the future (or even the present). At first the reader might be tempted to wonder if these miscreants will ever do anything else, and whether this is enough to sustain a whole novel. It is certainly not my story of choice. But there is more going on in the margins here. Minor characters like The Prospector and Quinn's uncle hint at the deeper thematic concerns that gradually work their way to the surface.
And you will keep reading on the strength of the prose. John Duffy can WRITE. There are passages of phosphorescent beauty and emotional insight that can go head to head with any of your favourite literary NYT authors, but this book also has a dirty edge to it. The desert and cookie-cutter houses and dive bars across Arizona are shot through with an anthropomorphic lyricism that often stopped me in my tracks.
Is some of it slightly overwritten? Maybe, if I wanted to nitpick for the sake of it, but that's what happens when a writer swings big... in any case you get absolute gems on pretty much every page of this novel. Too many to quote, but I will drop one:
"No one here ever asks me what I plan to do with my life. They only ever ask what I plan to do tonight."
This is spoken by the main character about 100 pages in and serves as a mantra for the entire book and its characters who are all living in the moment. Caught in the liminal space between teenager and adult. Partying automatons at the birth of social media as we know it. The first half builds to a crescendo then the karmic bill for all the hedonistic recklessness and hollowed out emotions comes due by around the halfway point. This is where the novel shifts into the next gear, and it moves with the propulsion of a thriller as everything crumbles.
Despite the much announced death of the Literary Male online, he is very much alive and kicking here. There is a strong masculine energy to this book, but it should appeal to all readers of powerful fiction. Cannot recommend this novel enough.
This is Hemingway with skaters and Myspace and the looming threat of the 2008 financial crisis - this last one expertly woven into the comparative microcosm of the story being told here. There are nods to The Sun Also Rises by way of character names. The Great Gatsby is also a spiritual ancestor. The sex and the moral torpor had Amazon recommending Michel Houellebecq to me next, but this is much better - and I actually like Houellebecq (sometimes, and against my better judgement).
It is a tale of aimless shallow twentysomethings drinking, f**king, and getting f**ked up as a means of avoiding the future (or even the present). At first the reader might be tempted to wonder if these miscreants will ever do anything else, and whether this is enough to sustain a whole novel. It is certainly not my story of choice. But there is more going on in the margins here. Minor characters like The Prospector and Quinn's uncle hint at the deeper thematic concerns that gradually work their way to the surface.
And you will keep reading on the strength of the prose. John Duffy can WRITE. There are passages of phosphorescent beauty and emotional insight that can go head to head with any of your favourite literary NYT authors, but this book also has a dirty edge to it. The desert and cookie-cutter houses and dive bars across Arizona are shot through with an anthropomorphic lyricism that often stopped me in my tracks.
Is some of it slightly overwritten? Maybe, if I wanted to nitpick for the sake of it, but that's what happens when a writer swings big... in any case you get absolute gems on pretty much every page of this novel. Too many to quote, but I will drop one:
"No one here ever asks me what I plan to do with my life. They only ever ask what I plan to do tonight."
This is spoken by the main character about 100 pages in and serves as a mantra for the entire book and its characters who are all living in the moment. Caught in the liminal space between teenager and adult. Partying automatons at the birth of social media as we know it. The first half builds to a crescendo then the karmic bill for all the hedonistic recklessness and hollowed out emotions comes due by around the halfway point. This is where the novel shifts into the next gear, and it moves with the propulsion of a thriller as everything crumbles.
Despite the much announced death of the Literary Male online, he is very much alive and kicking here. There is a strong masculine energy to this book, but it should appeal to all readers of powerful fiction. Cannot recommend this novel enough.
October 27, 2025
An exceptional novel that captures the conflicting atmosphere of the mid-aughts, Where When It Rains, Duffy's sophomore effort, lends a voice to an era of the digital age already forgotten by the inescapable march of time. Where most authors choose to either look forward or to settle themselves in a contemporary setting, Duffy dares to look to the past. Where When It Rains's first half reads like a modern-day Less Than Zero but with the emotional core of Hemingway's best. Its second half brings it home with an ending that will punch you in the gut with a force reminiscent of Steinbeck but with a touch of Vonnegut in the final paragraph. If you enjoy reading literary fiction that echoes the aforementioned authors above (and have a soft spot for the final grasp of carefree naivete that carried over from the 20th century and limped along into its inevitable grave by the summer of 2008), give this novel your undivided attention.
Plot: 7
Characters: 8
Style: 8
Concept/Execution: 8 (3/5)
Structure: 10
Diction: 8
Formatting: 8
Length: 9
Quotability: 10
Satisfaction: 9
85 monsoons out of 100
Plot: 7
Characters: 8
Style: 8
Concept/Execution: 8 (3/5)
Structure: 10
Diction: 8
Formatting: 8
Length: 9
Quotability: 10
Satisfaction: 9
85 monsoons out of 100
October 10, 2024
Riley arrives in Phoenix to skateboard and there realizes the risks of his pursuit. The novel is told in recollections of late-2000s years; That fact has several paying moments in the second part, but initially draws the eye to the styling of the party vignettes which form Riley and the book. Duffy constructs his paragraphs of short sentences and fragments, building a crisp picture of a desert city. The image effects are more interesting than the narrator's reflections on their significance. I was struck by the choices to let long sentences unwind, either describing motion or leaping into a description of Phoenix's sky "choking you with awe at that nuclear drop of honey that in its setting irradiates the strands of cloud visible to the eye and the sea of ozone and exhaust otherwise hidden". There's more to that sentence, then the chapter ends on the unreality of life, Riley's alienation from his family, the "unquestioned absurdity" of new life. The first section feels of mattering.
Part Two opens with another epigraph from Ecclesiastes, but the author shatters the carefully-constructed unreality. I was unable to focus on developments in style as the narrative layered events into melodrama. No more drifting: Now Riley is pulled from misfortune to misfortune. If I had some problems with word-level overwriting in Part One, here my discomfort was with the story's treatment of its women. The presence of young women as present objects and potential beautiful futures gives way brutally to the narrative's past tense.
I suspect Where When It Rains will work for fans of Cormac McCarthy. I don't count myself as one, and blame some of my ambivalence on that. But the book has plenty going for it-as-it: The style is not cribbed. Duffy has a wonderful honesty about the modern Southwest. Captured is the timeless sun, but so is the blacktop and the alcohol that pass for landscape for 21st-century youth. The book arrives at plenty of romance, is desperate for it by the end, but that's a struggle in this environment. Thanks to his vertigo, Riley can no longer "feel the world in a way that humans weren't supposed to feel it"; Alcohol prevents him really knowing the parties he documents, even though "knowing never did a damn thing". Romance only exists when the characters get together, and those gatherings are inevitably tainted by outsideness. It's a small piece of the book and only one view, but Duffy's subtle coverage of the transition to camera phones is deft, as is his honesty about the conditional invisibility of the Great Recession.
I had different problems with each part of Where When It Rains, but the complete novel is more than the sum of its parts. Early implications become ugly flowers, preventing the first half from being didactic. That same half appears strangely autofictional in light of the end: The reflections smack of a young man, maybe the semi-truth of interrogation, but not the synthesis suggested by an entire life. The book is an imagined happy moment, self-aware and with all the coming-of-age-novelistic ironies.
I received a free advance review copy and am leaving an honest and voluntary review; Thanks to John for that and for writing the book. Thanks to future readers and reviewers as well: This is a novel that deserves discussion.
Part Two opens with another epigraph from Ecclesiastes, but the author shatters the carefully-constructed unreality. I was unable to focus on developments in style as the narrative layered events into melodrama. No more drifting: Now Riley is pulled from misfortune to misfortune. If I had some problems with word-level overwriting in Part One, here my discomfort was with the story's treatment of its women. The presence of young women as present objects and potential beautiful futures gives way brutally to the narrative's past tense.
I suspect Where When It Rains will work for fans of Cormac McCarthy. I don't count myself as one, and blame some of my ambivalence on that. But the book has plenty going for it-as-it: The style is not cribbed. Duffy has a wonderful honesty about the modern Southwest. Captured is the timeless sun, but so is the blacktop and the alcohol that pass for landscape for 21st-century youth. The book arrives at plenty of romance, is desperate for it by the end, but that's a struggle in this environment. Thanks to his vertigo, Riley can no longer "feel the world in a way that humans weren't supposed to feel it"; Alcohol prevents him really knowing the parties he documents, even though "knowing never did a damn thing". Romance only exists when the characters get together, and those gatherings are inevitably tainted by outsideness. It's a small piece of the book and only one view, but Duffy's subtle coverage of the transition to camera phones is deft, as is his honesty about the conditional invisibility of the Great Recession.
I had different problems with each part of Where When It Rains, but the complete novel is more than the sum of its parts. Early implications become ugly flowers, preventing the first half from being didactic. That same half appears strangely autofictional in light of the end: The reflections smack of a young man, maybe the semi-truth of interrogation, but not the synthesis suggested by an entire life. The book is an imagined happy moment, self-aware and with all the coming-of-age-novelistic ironies.
I received a free advance review copy and am leaving an honest and voluntary review; Thanks to John for that and for writing the book. Thanks to future readers and reviewers as well: This is a novel that deserves discussion.
September 25, 2024
Surprised to be the first to review this, thanks Net Galley for the ARC! A slow burner, beautiful but sometimes challenging prose and a tragic but brilliant story. Will definitely pick up a copy of his other book!
March 1, 2025
Riley toll me on a journey like no other. His life went from lows to highs to lows then to content. He lived on the edge but I feel he had regrets for a lot of his choices. At the end he’s leaving us with the belief he found happiness. There are a lot of Riley’s out there and the author didn’t hold back
November 3, 2024
Loved reading this book! Amazing writing!
November 10, 2025
Definitely one of the best books I’ve read this year. Looking forward to whatever the author puts out next.
September 26, 2025
I picked this book up after seeing other authors on X posting about how good it was. It did not disappoint. Of course the writing is excellent, but that's beside the point. More importantly, is it fun? Absolutely.
The main character is a relatable young man named Riley recovering from a coma-inducing head injury that ended his promising skateboarding career. As he finds a new ways to occupy his time, the novel pulls you into the sizzling Arizona nightlife scene and makes you feel like you're there with him. If you ever had a drinking, partying, hook-up phase in your life, this portion feels like a delightful flashback - until things start going wrong.
Along the way, Riley finds companionship, lust, impossible desire, and even love - unfortunately, he finds them in different women. As the partying continues and Riley's relationships with these different women become pitted against each other, both comedy and tragedy ensue. I won't spoil it, but the book ends perfectly, and as you read the last page, you think: "Yeah, that's exactly right. That's it."
The main character is a relatable young man named Riley recovering from a coma-inducing head injury that ended his promising skateboarding career. As he finds a new ways to occupy his time, the novel pulls you into the sizzling Arizona nightlife scene and makes you feel like you're there with him. If you ever had a drinking, partying, hook-up phase in your life, this portion feels like a delightful flashback - until things start going wrong.
Along the way, Riley finds companionship, lust, impossible desire, and even love - unfortunately, he finds them in different women. As the partying continues and Riley's relationships with these different women become pitted against each other, both comedy and tragedy ensue. I won't spoil it, but the book ends perfectly, and as you read the last page, you think: "Yeah, that's exactly right. That's it."
December 19, 2024
I enjoyed this book even more than John's first book- A Ballroom for Ghost Dancing. Perhaps it was because I lived in the Phoenix area (where most of this book takes place), but I found myself identifying with the characters. I definitely knew people in AZ that lived like the characters in this book and while reading I couldn't wait to see what was going to happen next. More than once this book reminded me of the lyrics of a Bruce Springsteen song (Tunnel of Love)- "you've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above". The last few lines of this book have stuck with me and when given some time, I would like to ruminate on them as they definitely struck a chord with me.
January 8, 2025
Some years ago I attended a lecture by the novelist and essayist Charles Baxter. He offered the advice that part of our tasks as writers is to capture the past. He urged us to write down what we found essential, unique, individual in our lives. What would otherwise be forgotten. He wouldn’t, for example, describe all the known qualities of a bar, but that which distinguished that bar from all other bars.
I say all this because there was a last brief era in the 21st century between the advent of cell phones and the modern smartphone when a man could still bring a camera to a party and be feted for it. And that moment or those years leading up to the first smartphones and their omnipresent cameras is worth capturing.
This is the great gift of the novel, and the novelist. He attends to a privileged moment in time, and in the expanded consciousness of that moment gives us an image of a life, of how people lived and died. No writer can capture everything. In Where When It Rains, John F. Duffy captures his piece of it. In the heat and amnesia of a Southwestern American city, a young man wakes up in the hospital after a serious skateboarding accident and has to re-imagine his life. He falls in love, in lust. He is surrounded by vanity, insecurity, shallowness, depth. He is part of it all, but distant from it, observing through a lens.
In the particular is contained the universal, says some dead Irishman. There was once a particular moment in time in Phoenix, Arizona where lost amid a wasteland of other partygoers, a young man brought a camera to parties to capture something of the way they lived.
And I find that beautiful.
I say all this because there was a last brief era in the 21st century between the advent of cell phones and the modern smartphone when a man could still bring a camera to a party and be feted for it. And that moment or those years leading up to the first smartphones and their omnipresent cameras is worth capturing.
This is the great gift of the novel, and the novelist. He attends to a privileged moment in time, and in the expanded consciousness of that moment gives us an image of a life, of how people lived and died. No writer can capture everything. In Where When It Rains, John F. Duffy captures his piece of it. In the heat and amnesia of a Southwestern American city, a young man wakes up in the hospital after a serious skateboarding accident and has to re-imagine his life. He falls in love, in lust. He is surrounded by vanity, insecurity, shallowness, depth. He is part of it all, but distant from it, observing through a lens.
In the particular is contained the universal, says some dead Irishman. There was once a particular moment in time in Phoenix, Arizona where lost amid a wasteland of other partygoers, a young man brought a camera to parties to capture something of the way they lived.
And I find that beautiful.
August 16, 2025
A modern Western. Contemporary fiction set at the turn of a Brave New Century. Fans of B.E. Ellis and Cormac McCarthy will be thrilled to find risks taken at the narrative and sentence level. A perfectly balanced character-driven novel where truth and reality represent the human condition: All is (or may be) a sort of fiction - no matter our present or history. Frightfully rendered and beautifully written, an expression of what it means to be _after_ coming of age. Put this beside Patrick DeWitt. And, curiously, Marilynne Robinson.
November 19, 2025
An excellent book. Duffy's sentences delight, and the tale - about a young man that falls into a self-destructive scene that's maybe all too familiar for many of us - is compelling, all the more because of its adept portrayal of a time not long ago - the years around the 2008 market crash - and its parallels, its loving homage, to Hemingway's "lost generation" writing. This is an accomplishment. And, if someone were to ask me to point them toward a great book by an independent publisher, one that can help you rethink your map of the literary establishment, this would be on the short list.
October 15, 2025
A must-read for anyone who got fucked up on the reg in the aughts. Unique southwest setting, relatable circumstances for late Gen X and elder Millennials at the time. Reminded me a lot of my lost twenty-something years back in the MySpace era—trying to figure out where I belonged and what I wanted to do for the rest of my life—all while making bad decisions. It's rare to find a book these days that I look forward to reading every night, but I did with this one.
January 14, 2025
I have never read a book that encompasses a time and place so well. Maybe you can relate to being so absorbed in a ‘scene’ where you work to party and party to find work. Everyone Riley knows is pulsing with the excitement of ‘living in the now’ and he falls into a comfortable spot while working through his own deep issues. Until life catches up and wrecks everything he thought he knew.
January 31, 2025
While not for me, this is a perfect fit for readers who crave a poignant and unflinching portrayal of the complexities of youth, identity, and the search for meaning, love, and redemption in the midst of chaos and self-discovery.
March 2, 2025
The author paints a very vivid picture of a certain slice of life. I really liked the crisp clear writing style. I haven't read the authors first book, but I'm definitely going to check it out.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews