Book Review: Child of a Rainless Year, by Jane Lindskold

Easily the best new book I’ve read in several years

It’s hard to believe that it came out in May and I’m just now coming across it, but Jane Lindskold’s Child of a Rainless Year is the best new book I’ve read in a long time. I’d read some of her short stories here and there, but none of her novels had jumped out at me from the bookshelf until now.

I’m struggling to put into words exactly what it is that makes the book such a great read. A good part of it is the pacing, I think, as well as just the right balance (for me, at least) between between description and action, and between language and story. This may just be me, but with most fiction out there, I usually feel that either the language overwhelms the story or the story overpowers the language. This is one of the rare books where they are equally strong, complementing each other rather than fighting for my attention. Most of all, though, it’s simply a damn good story.

I guess a brief summary would be that Mira grew up in a house that was very mysterious in many ways (and not in the cliched ways which are no longer mysterious at all), in New Mexico. When she’s nine, her mother disappears and she is sent to live with foster parents who are required to move to a new state and change their names as a requirement of the mysterious trustees of her mother’s estate. All sorts of things happen, eventually building up to a middle-aged Mira returning to the house she grew up in, which she’d now inherited. She starts trying to understand all of the mysteries that surround her childhood, her mother, the house, her foster parents, and her connection with art and color.

The book pulls together an amazing mix of art, local history and culture, psychology, hidden family secrets, and the paranormal — and more importantly, all in a way that builds the story, rather than just dumping information here and there because the author had it.