This book is about dust, loss, waiting, and keeping silent. It reminds me of Willa Cather and Steinbeck. The most curious paragraph is one where it states what Samuel could not know about the future, including the aquifer and tree-planting projects which would eventually have an impact on dust storms.

I Will Send Rain is one of those in-between books for me. I enjoyed it but it seemed to drag in a few places and I wasn't fond of the constantly shifting POV.
That being said it's a gritty, beautifully written story following an Oklahoma family during the Dust Bowl.

Annie's daughter is a dreamer who is experiencing her first love/heartbreak, her son is sick and her husband isn't the same man he once was. Meanwhile, she finds herself drawn to another man.

The characters were fleshed out and you can't help but feel for them. Their suffering is heartbreaking but despite everything they prove to be quite resilient and you have to admire the Bell family for staying put and waiting out this terrible drought.

*ARC provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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I Will Send The Rain
written by Rae Meadows

While reading this book I was drawn in remembrance to reading The Grapes of Wrath about the dust bowl. Unlike the Joads exodus in The Grapes Of Wrath to California, the Bells stay in Oklahoma and try to scrap up a semblance of life. Through the drudgery of life that the Bells live through mother Annie finds that she is struggling with her identity and the desire to live the life she is having to live. She finds solace in the arms of the Mayor of Mulehead a man that represents the travel, and excitement in the big cities, that she wanted to embark on as a young woman. In the middle of this affair she is dealing with her pregnant daughter “Birdie” and her little boy Fred, who has asthma which is exacerbated by the dust storms. To escape from the worries of his farm, father Samuel builds a boat that he feels he was called to build. He becomes the laughing stock of the town. Birdie and Annie have a hard time understanding the necessity of said boat until the rains come and flood the ground for half a day.

This book to me is sad on so many levels. Samuel feels that he is doing what is right and the only support he gets is from the town minister and his little 9 year old boy Fred. He feels the resentment from Annie and Birdie but does not let that stop him. The sadness I feel for him is that he is clueless to anything else that is going on in his little families world.

Annie knows that she is doing wrong by being with Mayor Jack Lily but she can’t stop herself. I find that I can relate to her as she is struggling with her inner self: who is she, where does she stand in her husband’s world. Her daughter is almost 16 and she doesn’t need her anymore. She can’t help Fred to breath better than she already does using a tonic containing Petrol. How is she to deal with all her feelings and build up her children and husband during these trying times? She is falling apart.

Birdie wants to escape she, like her mother at her same age, sees a world she wants to live in far away from their little tiny farming town but can’t see a way to escape except through her boyfriend, Cy. He moves with his family without telling her, this is tragic in so many ways as she was about to tell him that they were going to have a baby. Then she realizes she is stuck to the world she doesn’t want to stay in. 

I enjoy the way Ms. Meadows tells this story. I always wondered what the Joads went through before they left for California and this story fills in blanks based on what other’s experiences were. Ms. Meadows has a casual style that I like while I am reading. She shows the world the Bell’s are living in. I could feel the dust going up my noise, the stifling way they couldn't breath especially Fred and the lack of any inhaler which wasn’t around back then. 
Ms. Meadow’s characters are real to me and this is what draws me into the world she has created. Thank you for that Ms. Meadows! ( )

This book is all about the characters. It’s not exactly plot-driven, and people looking for historical fiction filled with lots of details about the events of the Dust Bowl may be disappointed here. However, anyone who enjoys books with realistic, flawed, and nuanced characters should take a look at this. One family struggles through a brutal summer—they may lose their money, their harvest, their home, and their whole way of life—and the extreme circumstances bring to the fore some of the hidden facets of their personalities. Here, pushed to their limits, these compelling characters will come to understand themselves and each other, and secrets long-buried will be pulled into the light of day. The writing is sharp, and the characters are vivid and feel real. A deeply emotional read that will linger even after the last page.

A pretty standard domestic drama of family members individually leading lives of quiet desperation: Dad's having religious visions; Mom's eyes are wandering; Sis dreams of running away to the city with the boy next door; and little Fred is a sickly little mute being dragged toward the end of innocence. Set in the 1930s Dustbowl, this book takes the opposite tack of Steinbeck's [book:The Grapes of Wrath|18114322], with the family sitting pat on their Oklahoma farm as they spiral into despair, their dreams coated in the deepest dust, all trace of them blowing away with the wind.

The story lurches slowly and depressingly to its inevitable conclusion, leaving me more glad that I finished the book than that I read it. ( )