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.
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“Through Emily Sutton-Smith’s narration, listeners experience the figurative and literal dust settling deep within the family members…Sutton-Smith’s portrayals of the characters are strong. Especially noteworthy is the soft, uncertain voice of Samuel Bell, the father, as well as that of young Fred, a mute asthmatic..Sutton-Smith delivers a portrait of yearning as penetrating as the dust storms she describes.”
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