This month is packed with book birthdays...meaning tons of opportunities to celebrate! Today's read is the first in a brand new series, which hits the shelves tomorrow. This one caught my interest because of its genre and blurb. It's been awhile since I've picked up a dystopian...well, I guess that's not completely true. I did read The Diseased Ones by Danielle Harrington earlier this year (HERE) Today's read should, however, take a less fantasy-filled direction (no powers) and head into survival mode as a girl faces a never ending rain and watches the world fall apart around her. I'm curious how it will go, especially since it's the first in a series.
Grab a warm cup of tea or hot cocoa and curl up into that blanket because this one will, hopefully, hit like a storm and hold all the way through.
WHEN THE RAIN CAME
Volume 1
by Matt Eicheldinger
Andrews McMeel Publishing
YA Dystopia
320 pages
The rain never stops. The world is drowning. Survival is everything. When the Rain Came is the first YA book in an all-new, action-packed dystopian adventure series by New York Times bestselling author Matt Eicheldinger.
“If we stay here, if we keep wandering without a real plan, we won’t last. Maybe The Hill is dangerous. But maybe it’s not. It’s the only plan we have.”
Seventeen-year-old Aurora knows how to survive. Life in the foster system has taught her how to stay quiet, stay smart, and stay ready. But nothing could prepare her for this: a never-ending storm that swallows cities, drowns forests, and turns the world into a flooded wasteland.
Trapped in a collapsing house with her strict prepper foster parents, Aurora is forced to live by their rules just to stay alive. Until the day they disappear without a trace.
Alone. Abandoned. And running out of time.
All Aurora has is a waterlogged scrap of paper and a “The Hill.”
With looters closing in and the floodwaters rising higher each day, she’s left with one impossible choice—stay and wait for the storm to take her, or risk everything on a journey through the drowned remains of the world, to a find a place that may or not exist.
It’s forward or nothing.
With echoes of Life As We Knew It, The Last of Us, and Hatchet, Aurora’s story is a gripping, emotionally resonant survival story about resilience, found family, and one girl’s fight to reclaim her future in a drowning world.
“If we stay here, if we keep wandering without a real plan, we won’t last. Maybe The Hill is dangerous. But maybe it’s not. It’s the only plan we have.”
Seventeen-year-old Aurora knows how to survive. Life in the foster system has taught her how to stay quiet, stay smart, and stay ready. But nothing could prepare her for this: a never-ending storm that swallows cities, drowns forests, and turns the world into a flooded wasteland.
Trapped in a collapsing house with her strict prepper foster parents, Aurora is forced to live by their rules just to stay alive. Until the day they disappear without a trace.
Alone. Abandoned. And running out of time.
All Aurora has is a waterlogged scrap of paper and a “The Hill.”
With looters closing in and the floodwaters rising higher each day, she’s left with one impossible choice—stay and wait for the storm to take her, or risk everything on a journey through the drowned remains of the world, to a find a place that may or not exist.
It’s forward or nothing.
With echoes of Life As We Knew It, The Last of Us, and Hatchet, Aurora’s story is a gripping, emotionally resonant survival story about resilience, found family, and one girl’s fight to reclaim her future in a drowning world.
MY TIDBITS
A world falls apart under relentless rain, leaving a seventeen-year-old girl on the impossible mission to survive.
It has been raining all over the world non-stop for weeks, and there's no sign of it stopping any time soon...if ever. Hunkered down in her latest foster parents' mansion outside of the city, Aurora's, at least, still alive thanks to their years of prepping for a disaster of any kind. When she wakes up one morning to find them gone, she's devastated that she's been abandoned again, but this only holds for a moment as two men burst in to kill her. Barely escaping, she finds herself on a canoe with a couple days of supplies and no where to go, except for a place she keeps hearing whispers about, The Hill. And these whispers aren't necessarily hinting at anything good.
The author does an excellent job at bring this rotting, wet world to life. The problems of mold, leaks, constant dampness, and more come across with grabbing reality. Aurora's situation makes sense, and her foster parents' distance to her emotionally adds an odd edge to create uncertainty. The first chapters give the reader time to sink into the entire world, situation, and gain a grasp on Aurora's personality. Her fighter spirit mixed with a hidden desire to belong to a family make her easy to sympathize with and give her enough toughness to believe that she might have a chance to overcome what she'll face. There is also a constant sense of tension even in calmer moments, which keeps the pages turning, and it's not just thanks to the never-dying threat of the rain or drive to survive...although these definitely pack enough suspense to make it a grabbing read on their own. Instead, the danger caused by the selfishness of others and the extent they'll go to to survive keeps Aurora's situation dire. Then, there's the entire secret surrounding The Hill and even a possibly more sinister secret underneath the water itself, which poses a constant threat to keep the pages turning. I ended up reading this in one sitting because it was engaging.
This is a great beginning to a series with the promise of so much more to come...and there are sure to be several surprises, which are impossible to see coming. Plus, the plot carries enough uniqueness to make it different than other dystopian reads. There are, however, a few things which kept me from absolutely loving this read. First, Aurora does not come across as seventeen, and I found myself (about 2/3rds the way through) stopping to look back and make sure she wasn't twelve or thirteen. Especially a girl who had supposedly been tossed around in a foster system and borders on adult on her own should have a lot more maturity. So, I am very tempted to recommend this read for the lower end of the YA audience. Then, there were several logic holes. For example, the depth of the water was very unclear with mentions that people in the Rockies were drowning but overpasses and parking garages still above water. Several other aspects also didn't really make sense (abandoned cars might have extra fuel...just saying).
But all in all, this was still a grabbing read and one I would recommend for survival, adventure, and dystopian fans.
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