Review: The Man who Rained - Ali Shaw

Genre: Fiction/Fable

Pages: 304

Published: January 2012

Publisher: Atlantic Books

Source: For review

When Elsa's father is killed in a tornado, all she wants is to escape — from New York, her job, her boyfriend — to somewhere new, anonymous, set apart. For some years she has been haunted by a sight once seen from an aeroplane: a tiny, isolated settlement called Thunderstown. 

Thunderstown has received many a pilgrim, and young Elsa becomes its latest — drawn to this weather-ravaged backwater, this place rendered otherworldly by the superstitions of its denizens. In Thunderstown, they say, the weather can come to life and when Elsa meets Finn Munro, an outcast living in the mountains above the town, she wonders whether she has witnessed just that. 

For Finn has an incredible secret: he has a thunderstorm inside of him. Not everyone in town wants happiness for Elsa and Finn. As events turn against them, can they weather the tempest - can they survive at all? 

The Man Who Rained is a work of lyrical, mercurial magic and imagination, a modern-day fable about the elements of love.

My thoughts:

I read this first book, The Girl with glass feet and was smitten. He made me believe it all could be real. That in some parts of the world there was still magic that was not truly magic, it was just life. It's not like paranormal books where you just read it but do not believe. Here, here it is different. Perhaps men can rain, and perhaps rain can come to life.

His prose is lyrical and it sucks you in, it holds on to you and it also made me feel scared. This is a town filled with superstitious people who kill that of rain and thunder. While on the mountain there lives a strange man called Finn, who is our man who rained. I feared for him.

The story is about Elsa who comes to Thundertown to start a new life. She is nice and curious and meets Finn. Who is mysterious and sweet. He shows her a world that seems to exist only in these mountains. It's a book filled with magical realism and feelings of longing, love but also hate of the unknown. And here it truly shows. That which you do not know you fear and think is dangerous. Only some give it a chance and find that we are all alike in the end.

The book is great, the writing, the story, the people in it and the world he creates. It's a place were sunbeams come to life.

Conclusion:

It's a book I recommend because it is so real and still so magical. I can't wait for his next book and see what he comes up with then. It was simply enchanting, heartbreaking and lovely.

Cover: 

Pretty