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Rain of Fire
When Steve's older brother Matthew, returning home after service in World War II, refuses to talk about his wartime experiences, Steve's friends begin to doubt the stories he has told of Matthew's heroism.
- GenresHistorical Fiction
153 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1983
1 person is currently reading
23 people want to read
About the author
Marion Dane Bauer
172 books186 followersMarion Dane Bauer is the author of more than one hundred books for young people, ranging from novelty and picture books through early readers, both fiction and nonfiction, books on writing, and middle-grade and young-adult novels. She has won numerous awards, including several Minnesota Book Awards, a Jane Addams Peace Association Award for RAIN OF FIRE, an American Library Association Newbery Honor Award for ON MY HONOR, a number of state children's choice awards and the Kerlan Award from the University of Minnesota for the body of her work.
She is also the editor of and a contributor to the ground-breaking collection of gay and lesbian short stories, Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence.
Marion was one of the founding faculty and the first Faculty Chair for the Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her writing guide, the American Library Association Notable WHAT'S YOUR STORY? A YOUNG PERSON'S GUIDE TO WRITING FICTION, is used by writers of all ages. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen different languages.
She has six grandchildren and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her partner and a cavalier King Charles spaniel, Dawn.
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INTERVIEW WITH MARION DANE BAUER
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Q. What brought you to a career as a writer?
A. I seem to have been born with my head full of stories. For almost as far back as I can remember, I used most of my unoccupied moments--even in school when I was supposed to be doing other "more important" things--to make up stories in my head. I sometimes got a notation on my report card that said, "Marion dreams." It was not a compliment. But while the stories I wove occupied my mind in a very satisfying way, they were so complex that I never thought of trying to write them down. I wouldn't have known where to begin. So though I did all kinds of writing through my teen and early adult years--letters, journals, essays, poetry--I didn't begin to gather the craft I needed to write stories until I was in my early thirties. That was also when my last excuse for not taking the time to sit down to do the writing I'd so long wanted to do started first grade.
Q. And why write for young people?
A. Because I get my creative energy in examining young lives, young issues. Most people, when they enter adulthood, leave childhood behind, by which I mean that they forget most of what they know about themselves as children. Of course, the ghosts of childhood still inhabit them, but they deal with them in other forms--problems with parental authority turn into problems with bosses, for instance--and don't keep reaching back to the original source to try to fix it, to make everything come out differently than it did the first time. Most children's writers, I suspect, are fixers. We return, again and again, usually under the cover of made-up characters, to work things through. I don't know that our childhoods are necessarily more painful than most. Every childhood has pain it, because life has pain in it at every stage. The difference is that we are compelled to keep returning to the source.
Q. You write for a wide range of ages. Do you write from a different place in writing for preschoolers than for young adolescents?
A. In a picture book or board book, I'm always writing from the womb of the family, a place that--while it might be intruded upon by fears, for instance--is still, ultimately, safe and nurturing. That's what my own early childhood was like, so it's easy for me to return to those feelings and to recreate them.
When I write for older readers, I'm writing from a very different experience. My early adolescence, especially, was a time of deep alienation, mostly from my peers but in some ways from my family as well. And so I write my older stories out of that pain, that longing for connection. A story has to have a problem at its core. No struggle
She is also the editor of and a contributor to the ground-breaking collection of gay and lesbian short stories, Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence.
Marion was one of the founding faculty and the first Faculty Chair for the Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her writing guide, the American Library Association Notable WHAT'S YOUR STORY? A YOUNG PERSON'S GUIDE TO WRITING FICTION, is used by writers of all ages. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen different languages.
She has six grandchildren and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her partner and a cavalier King Charles spaniel, Dawn.
-------------------------------------
INTERVIEW WITH MARION DANE BAUER
-------------------------------------
Q. What brought you to a career as a writer?
A. I seem to have been born with my head full of stories. For almost as far back as I can remember, I used most of my unoccupied moments--even in school when I was supposed to be doing other "more important" things--to make up stories in my head. I sometimes got a notation on my report card that said, "Marion dreams." It was not a compliment. But while the stories I wove occupied my mind in a very satisfying way, they were so complex that I never thought of trying to write them down. I wouldn't have known where to begin. So though I did all kinds of writing through my teen and early adult years--letters, journals, essays, poetry--I didn't begin to gather the craft I needed to write stories until I was in my early thirties. That was also when my last excuse for not taking the time to sit down to do the writing I'd so long wanted to do started first grade.
Q. And why write for young people?
A. Because I get my creative energy in examining young lives, young issues. Most people, when they enter adulthood, leave childhood behind, by which I mean that they forget most of what they know about themselves as children. Of course, the ghosts of childhood still inhabit them, but they deal with them in other forms--problems with parental authority turn into problems with bosses, for instance--and don't keep reaching back to the original source to try to fix it, to make everything come out differently than it did the first time. Most children's writers, I suspect, are fixers. We return, again and again, usually under the cover of made-up characters, to work things through. I don't know that our childhoods are necessarily more painful than most. Every childhood has pain it, because life has pain in it at every stage. The difference is that we are compelled to keep returning to the source.
Q. You write for a wide range of ages. Do you write from a different place in writing for preschoolers than for young adolescents?
A. In a picture book or board book, I'm always writing from the womb of the family, a place that--while it might be intruded upon by fears, for instance--is still, ultimately, safe and nurturing. That's what my own early childhood was like, so it's easy for me to return to those feelings and to recreate them.
When I write for older readers, I'm writing from a very different experience. My early adolescence, especially, was a time of deep alienation, mostly from my peers but in some ways from my family as well. And so I write my older stories out of that pain, that longing for connection. A story has to have a problem at its core. No struggle
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 4, 2012
This was an OK juvenile book that dealt with some pretty heavy issues. Steve's older brother has returned from serving in World War II and is suffering from a major case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Of course, in those days, nobody was really aware of PTSD and Steve feels that he has to lie about his brother so that the other kids don't make fun of Steve. Besides dealing with PTSD, this book also deals a lot with the ramifications of lying and doing things that you shouldn't do just to impress others. Over all, it was an ok book but pretty slow in parts. Maybe if I were the age of the books target audience, it would have gripped me more, but for me it fell kind of flat.
July 21, 2018
A young boy who has a problem telling the truth, an older brother back from military service in Japan at the end of WWII suffering from what he saw after Hiroshima, a newcomer to the town from the big city of Chicago whose father spent time in a Japanese POW camp along with several other characters. These all come together to show the negative impacts war can have on individuals and a neighborhood even though they never experienced combat or saw the fighting. Unfortunately I'm not sure today's young readers would find the book all that engaging, though it is worth a read.
February 14, 2019
Man. These kids just made one terrible decision after another. Lying ALL the time, treating each other awfully, stealing a friend's bike and painting it in an effort to incriminate the neighborhood bully, sneaking out to steal a letter from a mailbox, making deals with the bully and agreeing to steal dynamite from the quarry to give him in exchange for a cat he's holding hostage, looking at pornography, tying up the bully and making him think they're going to blow him up with the dynamite, lighting the blasting cap and watching him cry silently... good grief. What a book.
Name-calling, misusing God's name, lies, contempt, bullying, faithless friends. And on top of that, a war veteran struggling with life after WWII receiving ridicule from his father, brother, and the whole town because he's "idle" and "funny in the head" and a "Jap-lover" because he regretted the deaths he saw.
This was a rather awful story. And the blasting-cap went off and injured both the boy who lit it and the boy it was intended to frighten. At least the first boy was dashing back to stop the fuse out of pity for the bully before it went off. And the story ends as he talks with his soldier brother while he's recovering from the blast, and begins to see and understand his brother's trauma and feelings.
But not a wholesome read, in my opinion.
Name-calling, misusing God's name, lies, contempt, bullying, faithless friends. And on top of that, a war veteran struggling with life after WWII receiving ridicule from his father, brother, and the whole town because he's "idle" and "funny in the head" and a "Jap-lover" because he regretted the deaths he saw.
This was a rather awful story. And the blasting-cap went off and injured both the boy who lit it and the boy it was intended to frighten. At least the first boy was dashing back to stop the fuse out of pity for the bully before it went off. And the story ends as he talks with his soldier brother while he's recovering from the blast, and begins to see and understand his brother's trauma and feelings.
But not a wholesome read, in my opinion.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews