Review – The Rain Belongs Here by Julie Rogers
In between doing the things I needed to do like feed the family, walk the dog, etc. I spent time reading The Rain Belongs Here while having a lazy Sunday in 2020.
If she succeeds in finding him, he’ll be charged with murder. If she fails, he won’t likely survive on his own.
It’s 2064. Ana lives in the City, an experimental community that has had little contact with outsiders in decades. When her older brother Finn disappears on her 22nd birthday, a seemingly impossible event given the City’s extensive monitoring, she quits school, moves into her station wagon and embarks on an obsessive manhunt. Unable to find him on her own, she’s forced to partner with Aaron, a detective with his own complicated history and agenda.
Together they comb the dregs of the outside world, encountering both the horrors of lawless survivor communities and the unclaimed beauty of the old world. As Ana comes closer to understanding her brother’s disappearance, she’s forced to confront the truth about herself and her place in the City. Goodreads
It is the ideal mix of strong female lead, interesting mystery, well developed world building of an eerily real near future dystopia and actual characters not cardboard personalities.
I liked the slow burn of getting to know the world in The Rain Belongs Here and how it deviated from our present one. Fortunately there weren’t the awful habit of exposition or information dump. The reader slowly got to know the lead protagonist Ana along with her world as she investigated the disappearance of her brother Finn.
What we got was a mystery that was easily solved but that wasn’t the point. It was about how we -the reader got there. Most of my questions about this society how it worked, the rules and inhabitants were answered in an organic way. Characters were real personalities and motivations not paper thin: there primarily to drive this plot forward. Which often happens when there’s a road trip and you can legitimately have brief appearances from random people who help or hinder the investigation.
I liked it, primarily for the world, some things were skipped over, others not explained but it didn’t distract from what was a story told well.
Thank you to the author and BookSirens for this digital ARC.
3 Stars - Liked It