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I Will Send Rain: A Novel
From award-winning author Rae Meadows comes a luminous, tenderly rendered novel of a woman fighting for her family's survival in the early years of the Dust Bowl.
Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, and 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. 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, Annie's 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.
Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, and 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. 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, Annie's 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.
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Published August 9, 2016
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About the author
Rae Meadows
10 books446 followersRae Meadows is the author of the forthcoming WINTERLAND and four previous novels: Calling Out, No One Tells Everything, Mercy Train (in hardcover as Mothers and Daughters), and most recently, I Will Send Rain, which was an Indie Next pick, and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist. She is the recipient of the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, the Hackney Literary Award for the novel, and the Utah Book Award, and her work has been published widely. Meadows lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
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April 26, 2025
I liked it very much. Of course I like books about that period in history and the hardships endured during the dust bowl years.
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