Review: Work to read but worth the work
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 25, 2014
Rain was a unique reading experience – at least for me.  The style in which it is written is as if the author was channeling Ernest Hemingway who himself is possessed by a James Joyce gone mad.  The short sentences whirl the reader into a parallel dimension where punctuation, if ever invented, is a picture of minimalism.  The often missing quotation marks and commas sometimes make for confusion: did the character just say that or did he do it or thinking it?The science behind the world where sea levels have risen eight or nine thousand feet is not even sketchy.  As the story reveals, ‘there are many theories but no one knows’.  The physics of how the world in Rain achieves its unpleasant condition are not offered.  The story demands the reader to assume they simply are.Rain possesses an undeniable underlying strength:  its story.  Rain is not the kind of book I would normally read.  I nearly stopped reading several times but the short sentences made for fast reading and compelled me to the next page, then the next chapter and finally the end.  Without this strength I would have never finished the book and certainly would have mentally rated it as a one or two star work.  The bottom line is I couldn’t give it five because of the writing but the story deserves that.