Introduction

A luminous, tenderly rendered novel of a woman fighting for her family's survival in the early years of the Dust Bowl; from the acclaimed and award-winning Rae Meadows.

Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, 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. All around them 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, her 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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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1



Annie Bell awoke in the blue darkness before dawn, her nightdress in a damp tangle at her knees. She’d dreamed about the baby, ten years gone, but all that stayed with her were stray details: the tang of sour milk, a bleating cry she couldn’t soothe. Samuel slept beside her, his hand clenched, his face scrunched into the pillow. She inched away from him and sat up. There had been no rain for seventy-two days and counting. The mercury would climb past a hundred today and no doubt again tomorrow. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1. I Will Send Rain is an unusually visceral novel, one the reader feels very specifically, along with its characters. Why is this important? How does the physical world in which the Bells struggle reveal their character? Is “place” generally important to you in a novel?

2. What role has duty played (or not) in the choices Annie’s made throughout her life? Does it play a role in the choice she makes at the novel’s end?

3. Consider the novel’s overarching themes of family and love, faith and resilience and hope. How are they explored here? Is the story, in the end, a hopeful one?

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