Title: When the Rain Came
Author: Matthew Eicheldinger
Genre: YA
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
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.
This felt more like a middle grade than YA. A dystopian read, although the societal response to the weather disaster is basically non-existent, which doesn’t really make sense to me. No mention of weather forecasters, at the very least, much less the response by the government and first responders? That didn’t feel believable.
This was still a solid, very quick read, and is clearly a set-up for a series. Getting to know Aurora at the beginning gave enough of her background and who she was to showcase the change in her towards the end of the book, and the conflict made it intriguing.
Matthew Eicheldinger is a bestselling author. When the Rain Came is his newest novel.
(Galley courtesy of Andrews McMeel Publishing in exchange for an honest review.)
Tomorrow Is Another Day 