Rainwater

Loved this book. It was a different kind of book for Sandra Brown but it was definitely one of my favorites.

In 1934 Ella Barron owns and operates a boarding house in Gilead, Texas. The depressed economy is affecting many lives and she must keep her boarding house full in order to provide for herself and her mentally ill son, Solly. When the local Dr. asks her if a distant relative of his could rent her

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one vacant room, she agrees. Her new boarder, David Rainwater, is handsome and intelligent and takes an immediate interest in Solly. As David spends time with Solly day after day, Ella begins to realize that there is a chance that her son has more potential than she ever realized. David also becomes involved with the local community which brings the potential for danger and violence to the boarding house.

This a fairly short, very readable novel about a small town in Texas during the Great Depression. The plot is a departure from the type of books Brown usually writes . Her concentration on the Great Depression and on Solly's mental condition seems historically accurate and tells a story that is not well-known. Highly recommended.

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I thought this was a really great book and a complete departure from her normal romantic suspense. This was a gripping novel about bigotry, racial and mental, but had an overwhelming message of choosing to do the right thing during difficult circumstances. I highly recommend reading this novel. I

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started it on a snowy Saturday morning when I sat down to read just for a few minutes because I had so many other things to do and just could not pull myself away!

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Slow to start but hard to put down after you get a couple chapters in. It's not your typical "feel good" romance though.

A pretty solid piece of work, although I felt a bit slighted by the ending. The protagonist is a compelling women, but I was a bit baffled by her attraction to the male lodger, Mr. Rainwater. Drama from the men in town also stymied the novel a bit, as I felt it was sporadically plopped into the

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narrative. Overall, a good book, but one that I will probably not read again.

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Great historical fiction; wonderful story; didn't end the way I thought it would which was a very pleasant surprise.

This book was different from most of Sandra Brown's book so I was slow to pick it out of my stack and read it. But once I started it I was hooked. The characters were all interesting and I think she did a great job of describing the times and how people were treated. Some of the book was sad but it

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is a story about surviving and learning about yourself and giving hope to others.

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I really liked this book. Have tissue ready for the end. Just a great story!

excellent book. Sandra did not let me down.

Ella Barron is a strong woman in 1934 Texas, efficiently running her rural boarding house on her own and caring for her young son Solly, who shows the symptoms that will in later years be recognized as a syndrome called autism. David Rainwater comes to the boardinghouse, looking for a place to

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spend his final months of life. As he and Ella come to know each other, he has a growing impact on her and Solly's lives, and the lives of the denizens of this hardscrabble community as they attempt to cope with the Dustbowl, the Great Depression, and the well-meaning government policies that have added to the social and racial tensions that grip the town, exacerbated by the well-connected bully Conrad Ellis, who has pursued Ella since childhood. This is a spare, beautifully paced and written story of human dignity in the face of gripping poverty, compassion and sacrifice, and eventually love in the face of looming death. There are elements of "To Kill a Mockingbird" here, and indeed Rainwater reminds me of nobody more than Atticus Finch. He is almost too good and noble a character to be believable, but Sandra Brown adroitly skirts that pit-hole. The only flaw is an ending that is a bit abrupt and jarring, but this may only be an impression left by comparison with the leisurely buildup to the climax.

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I received this copy of Rainwater from the author, Sandra Brown, as a Goodreads First Reads winner, and I have to say, this is one of the best written and most moving stories I have ever read.

The book is filled with wonderful characters and by the end of the story, you feel a connection to each and

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every one of them.

Ella Barron runs a boarding house during the Great Depression and lives there with her autistic son, Solly. In a town where racial tension runs high and economic times are tough, for Ella every day is pretty much a repeat of the day before--she works hard and you realize quickly that Ella is a strong woman who simply does what needs to be done in order to support herself and her son.

Things probably would have gone on that way indefinitely if not for the arrival of her new boarder, David Rainwater. David is a soft-spoken man with a strong sense of right and wrong, and awakens in Ella emotions she cannot control.

Caught together in a fight against the injustices against the black community and later uniting as lovers, Sandra Brown spins a beautiful, yet sad story about lovers with too little time.

Great read! Add this book to your "to read" list!

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Brown, a master of contemporary romantic suspense, makes a huge genre leap in her latest novel. Radically switching gears, she sets this gentle tale in Depression-era Texas. The historical setting is not her only departure from her tried-and-true formula; this bittersweet morality play also

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features a hardworking single mother, an autistic child, and a mysterious boarder with a terminal medical condition. The moment Ella Barron agrees to let a room to David Rainwater, her hardscrabble circumstances are irrevocably altered. As the townspeople, farmers, and ranchers struggle both economically and spiritually, a malevolent evil in the form of a menacing town bully threatens their tenuous hold on survival. Though initially suspicious of Mr. Rainwater, Ella falls passionately in love with a man she knows is doomed. When he makes the ultimate sacrifice to save her misunderstood son, he leaves behind a precious final gift and a lasting legacy of grace and compassion.

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I loved this book and since I'm usually not a romance fan, I don't know what that says. The time period was fascinating (and brutal) and her Sandra Brown's characters felt immediately real to me. I missed everyone when I was finished. I'm mailing it to my grandma tomorrow!

Was reminiscent of John Grisham's Painted House. A wonderful story.

I read the e-book version. I may have missed something. The discussion questions in the back mentioned an epilogue that my version did not have and desperately needed. It would have tied everything together. The book starts at when Solly is a grown man talking to two people in his antique store and

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ends abruptly as a child. Definitely something VERY important was missing. Not normally a fan of romance, this one was a cut above, but definitely lacked closure without the epilogue to tie things together. I doubt any editor would have allowed Sandra Brown to leave the ending like that.

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This one is a real departure from the author's usual racy style. RAINWATER is set in depression era Texas and describes the challenges of life for a single mother in a rural community. Her son would be diagnosed with autism were the story set today. Brown did a good job of demonstrating

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relationships between characters of the story.

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Good book, but.

Not your usual Sandra Brown, until close to the end, this is a sweet little book. But.

Brown completely squanders an opportunity for deeper place and character development in the mid-passages, choosing instead in a few sentences to sum up a month's worth of plot development. She

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does the same thing at the end, which could have been tortured passage for both characters, really testing their mettle--and their love--but she passes it off in a few sentences.

And then there are the small things, like cars crossing yellow lines on dirt roads, which jerk the reader completely out of the story for a moment. I don't know about Texas, but in North Carolina and Georgia we don't paint our dirt roads!

It may be different, in different parts of the South, but where I come from, persons speaking Black dialect do not employ "they's" for "their". In NC, "they's" was a contraction for "there is", commonly used in place of "there are" as well. For "their," people where I grew up used "they", as in, "ridin' in they car over to they house." In other words, both "there" and "their" are pronounced "they," and the "'s" is added for the contraction, not the possessive. Brown's usage was distracting.

And finally, the story is supposed to be told second-hand by Ella's son. I can't imagine a woman raised in the first decades of the 20th century discussing her sex life in such detail with her son!

In short, the book was less smooth and tight than it should have been--Brown is no novice author. But still, it was sweet. I enjoyed it, and I cried at the end, as we are meant to.

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I read a lot more fantasy/Sci-fi than I do literary fiction, but even I need a little variety every now and then. This was a Firstreads win, so I decided to finally give it a read. I'm glad to have read it now that I have, even if it is one of those Depression era novels where even the happy

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endings are heart rending and sad. Having said that I did generally like it. Mostly because Mr. Rainwater was every bit the honourable gentleman of my dreams. He was wonderful. It would be awful hard not to like him. I liked Mrs. Barron, Margaret and the Doctor too, but it was Rainwater who stole the show. Guess that's why the book's named after him, huh?

This is the first Sandra Brown novel I've read and according to the acknowledges is a departure from her normal stories. She can sure write though. The prose of this book is beautiful and evocative. She manages to relate a lot of emotion in relatively few words. Small movements on the part of the characters relay a lot of meaning. Even though I had a fairly good idea of where the plot was going to end up (one way or another) I still hung on every word until I got there. Would be more than happy to read another of Mrs. Brown's books.

On a totally unrelated point, I read the hardback edition and it is a beautifully put together book. I love the cover image and the addition of the little bit of fancy gold edging around the title and the deckle edging of the pages.

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From what I understand (not having read her before), "Rainwater" is a change-of-pace novel for its author, Sandra Brown. Already well known for her bestselling novels of the romantic thriller type, this time around Brown has written a more serious novel about a woman struggling to raise her

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autistic son in rural Texas during the Great Depression.

Ella Barron's life has not been an easy one. Her only child has increasingly withdrawn into his own little world, to the point that at age ten he is unable to communicate with anyone, including his mother. Her husband, apparently unable to cope with the responsibilities of a son like his, walked away one day and Ella has not seen him in several years. She supports herself and Solly by working around the clock to keep her four long-term boarders satisfied enough to stay with her. Ella and Solly have fallen into a comfortable routine by the time that new boarder David Rainwater moves into the house.

Despite her conscious effort to keep her relationship with Mr. Rainwater on a strictly professional basis, Ella finds herself strangely drawn to the man almost from the beginning. Ella Barron is a proper lady of her day and she knows the damage that gossip can do to a woman's reputation in a town the size of the one she has lived in all her life. Consequently, she works hard to hide her feelings for Rainwater and, luckily for her, the elderly spinster sisters and the traveling salesman who also board with her remain blind to the couple's slowly budding romance.

David Rainwater, though, is a man with a secret and he has come to live in Ella's boarding house for reasons of his own. As Ella learns, Rainwater is a man with little to lose and that makes him willing to take chances few men would be inclined to take otherwise. He will play an important role in the conflict that will soon tear the little community apart, a fight pitting the local sheriff and the town bully against townspeople, farmers, and the starving population of a nearby shantytown.

"Rainwater" is the story of a man that badly wants to do some good. And he does exactly that. The countless hours Rainwater devotes to little Solly pay off when the boy demonstrates an unexpected talent that encourages his mother to turn to medical specialists for advice about his condition. When he recognizes the utter brutality and wastefulness of what the sheriff is allowing to happen to local farmers and dairy ranchers, he organizes the locals in a way he hopes will limit the damage. Perhaps just as importantly, he brings love back into the life of a woman that had given up on it ever happening to her again.

"Rainwater" has a lot going for it but I did find it difficult to get very emotionally involved in a story that has so many one-dimensional characters. The town bully, for instance, is the stereotypical version of a bully most readers will be familiar with, right down to the rich parents who never bothered to tell him "no." The cowardly sheriff is not developed at all and readers will have to wonder what motivates this man to remain in the shadows while so much evil is happening in his town. And the local doctor and a charismatic black preacher, admirable as they are, do not move far beyond being clichés. All of these characters are interesting and I wanted to know more about them.

Rated at: 3.0

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Rainwater by Sandra Brown is a heart wrenching story set on the depression era. There’s plenty of drama running in this story, where Brown demonstrates her ability in capturing the setting and the time period, which makes this book an excellent read if you are looking for a change of pace.

Such a nice change of pace from her other novels (not that they're bad, quite good really), it's nice to read something different. I've recommended this book as a book club selection to my co-worker.

I found myself drawn into the lives of Ella and the other people in historical romance set in a small southern town during the Depression. Great on audio

Sandra Brown out did herself this book is an incredible piece of work! The characters are so well painted and I think not only is it a great read but also also brings awareness to Autism!

***Although I personally worked for two years with Autistic teen boys I never had an opportunity to meet up

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with a Savant as Solly was. I always wanted to though. I can really relate to how Ella had to handy the fits and how Ella and Rainwater used something so simple as spools or two nickles to pacify Solly. How routines and schedules work well and how they don't like certain things like a mess, having wet clothes, spilling food on themselves, anything out of order may bother them. Autistics have some sort of repetitive thing they do ie: Solly's was tapping his shoes together in the beginning as well as his newer learned habit to line up the dominoes in numerical order.

I have seen autistic persons that are obcessed watching cars drive, digging with a certain shaped stick and when it breaks making the stick again, watching certain parts of movies many times by rewinding a tape just to laugh again. It was very interesting while it lasted but alas it was a hard back breaking job to work with the teen boys and I would better our Character Ella was worn plumb out everynight!

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really liked this book.
It was one of those quiet stories that slowly drew me in and then it barreled to the end and...it was over.

Rainwater tells the story of a sad and lonely boarding house owner with an autistic son in the middle of the dust bowl. Into this sorry life strolls Mr. Rainwater. He is

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the new boarder in Mrs. Barron's boarding house and he is dying. That is a secret shared with Mrs. Barron when Mr. Rainwater's doctor cousin delivers him.

And that is how it begins.

The two circle around one another polite, at arms length, waiting for something. And then the government begins shooting cows at the neighboring dairy farms to provide a little money for the farmers. But, those shots set off something else in the town and eventually in Mrs. Barron, Solly (her son) and Mr. Rainwater.

There is a predictable strand to this story - but it is comfortable and sweet.

So - I would definitely recommend this one!

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