Review of Rain Reign by Dana Williams

1.  BIBLIOGRAPHY
Martin, Ann M. Rain Reign. New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2014. ISBN: 9780312643003.

2.  PLOT SUMMARY
Twelve-year-old Rose Howard has autism and goes through each day hunting for homonyms, following rules, and relating to numbers, particularly primes. She has difficulty making friends with her peers, connecting with her father, and communicating with most of the neurotypical people in her life because her brain works differently than others. Rose takes comfort in regularity and consistency, but nothing is regular or consistent when a hurricane rips through her small country town and her dog disappears. 

3.  CRITICAL ANALYSIS 
Ann M. Martin's Rain Reign focuses on the life and inner struggles of a 12-year-old child with autism. Rose Howard is being raised by her father, Wesley Howard, a single parent. Wesley and his brother Weldon weren't raised in the safest household. In fact, they bounced from foster home to foster home after being removed from their family due to their father's physical abuse. Rose's mother is out of the picture, and Wesley works as a part-time mechanic in a small country town and sends Rose to public school because he can't or is unwilling to transport her the 22 miles to a special school for children with autism. He has a short temper and does not like to take assistance from anyone willing to help with Rose. "My father always says that he's not going to be the kind of father that his father was. He says he's going to raise me up by himself if it kills him" (29). But throughout the book, Wesley's temperament is consistently at odds with his daughter's neurobiological needs. 

One of these needs is to keep up a list of homonyms that she learns, another is to always follow the rules in order to stay safe and out of trouble, and to relate to the world through numbers. Rose finds comforts in these habits, though socially they make her an outcast. Other fifth graders don't find the same interest in making lists of words as Rose does. They also don't tend to often become friends with children who have been left back a year in school, who have frequent sensory meltdowns, who can't understand the social shades of gray when it comes to rule following.  Nor do other children want to be around a child that has a very hard time having a reciprocal conversation.

Martin shows how integral Rose's public education is in trying to draw her into the world with other children. Rose has a full-time aide, Mrs. Leibler, who sits with her all day in class and at lunch. The school has buddies who sit at the lunch table with her as Rose tries to facilitate a balanced discussion not related to her favorite things. But in some ways, Rose can't let go of her need for consistency as she eats the same lunch every day (44-45). In addition to her social struggles, Rose has sensory sensitivity, particularly toward noises like the teacher's computer that hums (39). She also has trouble making eye contact when the teacher talks to her (39). 

I have to be fully honest. I have a child who is neurodiverse. And several times while reading this book, I felt like some of these lists of behaviors and social tics came off of a checklist that Martin created while she did her research. They aren't wrong, but I don't feel they're described from the perspective of a neurodiverse person, particularly one who is often actively narrating the book. 

What Martin does portray well is the absolute crushing difficulty children with autism face every day trying to find a successful connection with other children and even the adults in their lives. Every day these children spend so much time and mental energy trying to find the strength to transition and cope both during times of normal transition and during times of high stress. For example, after the hurricane, Rose and her father are stranded at home by flooding and she cannot go to school. Her father tells her the school is closed indefinitely. "Indefinitely implies uncertainty. I don't like uncertainty" (99). Martin stays true throughout the book in writing Rose as brutally honest about her reality, even when social constructs discourage her from that forwardness.

In this story, Rose has only two always loving connections: Her uncle Weldon and her dog, Rain. Rain not only snuggles her to comfort her and help her fall asleep, so she doesn't have to fall back on her ritual of counting from a high number backward by three (212-213), but she also protects her when her father threatens abuse. 

The book centers on the fact that Rain has gone missing in the hurricane and Rose uses a structured system of rules to try and find her dog. A dog that was lost because her father let Rain out in the storm for reasons Rose has never been able to understand and the situation comes to an ugly head. 

Martin created many emotional climaxes for this book that did bring me to tears. Sometimes because of the extreme trauma she invents for Rose, who is already living in a sad situation, and sometimes because Martin fails to give emotional depths to Rose to allow her to really feel what's happening to her. Instead, Martin only allows her shallow, stereotypical movements between sensory tantrums and logic-based coping mechanisms. It was also sad because just when Rose had started making headway with her classmates when she brought Rain to school, and after the storm when Rose and the other children could empathize with each other because of the extreme loss to their community from the flood damage, she starts to unravel the only home situation Rose has ever known. 

It was also interesting that on the inner book jacket, the book description does not identify Rose as having autism, but in the Amazon.com book description it "outs" her as having OCD and Asperger's Syndrome. I wonder why one would list the disabilities and the other would not. 

I tried to read this book with my child, who is 11, but he is not interested in reading books about children who are in socially scary situations. He is particularly adverse to book characters with disabilities like his own or stories where anything bad happens to mothers or support animals (he has his own emotional support cat). He can assure you that if his father had let out his cat in a hurricane, his response would not have been to ask lots of questions and pile up wood waiting for the cat to come back. His said his heart would die and there would be an emotional explosion unmatched ever in the history of time that would probably create a monumental depression. Although not all children who are neurodiverse are the same, having a deeper understanding of that child/emotional animal connection was a strong disappointment in this book. 

My son also said he feels that most books from neurotypical people who write about characters similar to him portray them in a way that makes him feel embarrassed, broken, and as a burden on family. 

For example, if Rose had been neurotypical, would her father have gotten drunk so much? Would he have had so many personal problems? Rose makes this connection in the book, too. She figures it is her fault that her mother left them.  It's stories like Rose's that lead my child to not wanting to read books about children with similar diagnoses because from the first time Rose is called the "r" word by a classmate he was done reading the book. In those few pages, he knew nothing good was going to happen to Rose in the story, and he said that authors often do a great disservice to neurodiverse children by not understanding that getting up and going to school every day is traumatic enough -- without all the lost dogs and superstorms. 

"Why doesn't anyone find that interesting enough to write about? Why do they need to torture us, too?"

Maybe he has a story to tell that he and other neurodiverse children will find more authentic than those written by well-meaning neurotypical authors. 

4.  AWARDS and REVIEW EXCERPTS
Schneider Family Book Award
Publishers Weekly Best Books
ALA Notable Children's Book
School Library Journal Best Books
CCBC Choice
Kirkus Reviews Best Books

From Kirkus Review
"A story about honorable living in the autistic narrator genre that sets the bar high." 

From School Library Journal
"Reader will empathize with Rose, who finds strength and empowerment thorugh her unique way of looking at the world." 

5. CONNECTIONS
There have been many middle-grade chapter books written with main characters that have disabilities but only a few of them have main characters with autism. If Rain Reign doesn't appeal to students, perhaps one of these others will. 

In addition, understanding that not all people with autism are the same and why autism is considered a spectrum disorder is critical for neurotypical children to begin engaging and empathizing with children with this diagnosis. Sensitivity should be given to reading about the subject in a class with children with neurobiological diagnoses because making behavior links between them could create or perpetuate existing bullying problems.

Fiction books regarding children with autism that might interest middle grade readers:

• Anything But Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin (ISBN 1416995005)
• Mockingbird by Katherine Erskin (ISBN 9780142417751)
• Superstar by Mandy Davis (ISBN 9780062377777)