I’ve mentioned before that I run a book club where some women and I get together every month to talk about some books we’re reading. We take turns picking a book each other, and then we discuss any other books we’ve read that we’d recommend to each other, which means our book lists are miles long. A couple of months ago it was my turn to pick the monthly read, and I chose Rain Reign, by Ann M. Martin.
If you don’t recognize her name, Ann M. Martin is the author of The Babysitters Club series. I didn’t actually know this when I chose Rain Reign, because I hadn’t read The Babysitters Club books since I was about eight, but I like to google authors to see what I can find out about their inspiration for writing particular books, and that’s when I made the connection. This made me even more excited to read her book.
Let me just tell you, Rain Reign was one of the best middle grade books I’ve read in a long time, and I read a whole lot of them. The emotions, the situations, the innocence, the lessons, the voice, every part of this book was so beautiful. The story follows Rose Howard, who is a little girl with Asperger’s. Her teachers and her father don’t always understand her, but she has an uncle who loves her for who she is. She also has a dog named Rain. But then a major storm hits her town, and Rain goes missing, and the rest of the story is about her quest to find her dog that is really a quest to find herself and the truth about her mother and what it means to be a family. I still get chills talking about this book. It was so well written, so lovable, so charming—one of those books that grabs hold of you and won’t let go. Readers will not forget Rose or her story.
What I loved most about Rain Reign was that it was told from the perspective of Rose. Martin captured so eloquently the voice of a kid with Asperger’s, and I believe this book will not only help other kids understand that the kids with Asperger’s are not weirdos but ordinary people who see the world differently, but it will also help Asperger’s kids feel like they have a voice, that they are understood, that they are not expected to be someone different. What a great contribution to the world of children’s literature.
But lest you think this is just a story about a girl with Asperger’s, I must make it clear: this is a story about a girl and her dog. The story about a girl with Asperger’s takes a backseat to the story of Rain and Rose.
Martin skillfully characterized Rose within the first few pages, as Rose got straight to the point:
“I like homonyms a lot. And I like words. Rules and numbers too. Here is the order in which I like these things;
“1. Words (especially homonyms)
“2. Rules
“3. Numbers (especially prime numbers)
This is a perfect way to show how a kid with Asperger’s would have listed something out, because they are very precise and matter-of-fact.
Here’s another great passage:
“I’m going to tell you a story. It’s a true story, which makes it a piece of nonfiction.
“This is how you tell a story: First you introduce the main character. I’m writing this story about me, so I am the main character.”
So much voice contained in this short passage. It’s as if Rose is just reciting facts, which is what Asperger’s kids love to do.
Martin also deftly showed how Rose was obsessed with details, another characteristic of Asperger’s kids. Talking about her teacher’s helper, Rose says this:
“She sits in an adult-size chair next to my fifth-grade see chair and rests her hand on my arm when I blurt something out int he middle of math. Or, if I whap myself in the head and start to cry, she’ll say, ‘Rose, do you need to step into the hall for a moment?’”
It’s such an innocent observation—Rose doesn’t realize there’s anything unusual about having a helper in the classroom. I just love this innocence.
In other places, Rose used precise numbers to communicate details:
“Down the road, 0.7 miles from my house is the J&R Garage, where my father sometimes works as a mechanic, and 0.1 miles farther along is a bar called The Luck of the Irish, where my father goes after work. There is nothing between my house and the J&R Garage except trees and the road. (Tell me some things about your neighborhood.)”
“Uncle Weldon lives 3.4 miles away on the other side of Hatford.”
She’s practicing normal conversation, which is hard for her, but it’s easy to see that her conversation is anything but normal, because how many kids would know precisely how far something is from their house?
Rose doesn’t show much emotion but only communicates information (later in the book, we know of her emotion by the way she recites prime numbers during the overwhelming scenes. I thought that was a fantastic way to show readers that Rose is overwhelmed, because she falls back to her safe place. I didn’t want to share examples here, because there would be spoilers.). I also love that in the simple sentence about Uncle Weldon we not only get information about how far Uncle Weldon lives from her and her father, but we also get an idea of how large the town is.
Martin also utilized humor in some of Rose’s observations, like this one:
“Now he’s supposed to go to Hatford Elementary on the third Friday of every month at 3:45 p.m. To discuss me. This is what he said when he read that: ‘I don’t have time for meetings. This is way too much trouble, Rose. Why do you do these things?’ He said that at 3:48 p.m. on a Friday when there was no work for him at the J & R Garage.”
Rose has just gotten some notes sent home, saying that the principal and Rose’s teacher would like to have some regular meetings with her father to discuss her progress. She delivers her observation with such innocence and shows us many things: her father’s refusal to understand the way she is, her teachers’ concern over her, and how well she knows and observes her father’s activities.
Rose knows her dog just as precisely, too:
“Rain’s back is 18 inches long. From the tip of her nose to the tip of her tail she’s 34 inches long.”
This will help her later, when Rain is lost in the middle of a storm and Rose must call all the nearby shelters to see if they’ve found her.
Rose lets her reader understand the trouble with her father, with small mentions of hard eyes and annoyance, even though she can’t really tell what they mean. Here she is talking about how to know when she and Rain should stay away from her father:
“Rain is smart. She never goes near my father right away. She stands in the doorway to my bedroom while we wait to see whether my father will say, ‘What’s for supper?’ If he says, ‘What’s for supper’ then it’s safe for me to serve him and for Rain to sit by the table while we eat. She can stare at us and put her paws in our laps wanting food until I see my father’s eyes get black and hard and that’s the signal that Rain should go back to my bedroom.”
It’s clear that Rose is a very observant child, even though she can’t interpret the looks on people’s faces or, necessarily, the tone of their voices. But she gathers all the information and keeps it for herself, analyzing it in a very non-emotional manner.
Here she tells us a little about her diagnosis:
“I hear lots of things I’m not supposed to hear, and lots of things nobody else is able to hear, because my hearing is very acute, which is a part of my diagnosis of high-functioning autism. The clicks our refrigerator makes bother me, and so does the humming sound that comes form Mrs. Kushel’s laptop computer.”
“I hear clicks and humming and whispers. And conversations in the psychologist’s offie when the door is almost closed.”
Throughout the book, we are peeling back the layers of Rose. She doesn’t give us all the information up front, but they come out eventually. It’s one of the best things about the book.
After Rain is lost, Rose repeats the story as much as she can:
“This is because my father let Rain outside without her collar during a superstorm.”
Her repeating is a sign that she is upset, that she is still trying to come to terms with the loss of her dog. It was endearing.
Here’s the closest we get to her emotions, which she says after Rain gets lost:
“The afternoons are long. They seem to be full of empty space—space between looking through the box and starting my homework, space between finishing my homework and starting dinner. I don’t know what to do with the space. Rain used to fill it.
“How do you fill empty space?”
It was so sad, such great commentary on how it feels like when something goes missing from your life, delivered in such an innocent way. She feels very sad, but she just feels it as empty space.
This was one of the most beautiful passages in the book, showing, once more, the sorrow Rain feels at losing her dog:
“When I am at home alone I study my list of homonyms. I look through my mother’s box.
“That is all.
“There is an ache inside of me, a pain.
“Is this what bravery feels like? Or loneliness?
“Maybe this is an ache of sadness.”
As soon as I finished this book, I had to pick it back up and read it again to my 6-year-old, who is a dog lover. He can’t get enough of it, and even after the second time through, neither can I. Rain Reign is a book that will remain in the hearts of its readers forever.
