The World Between the Rain

LoveReading4Kids Says

November 2024 Book of the Month

Alongside exploring loneliness and loss — and being lost — there’s a bounty of bravery and beauty between the pages of Susan Cahill’s The World Between the Rain. Rooted in the raw realities of grief, there’s a dream-like quality to this enchanting story that sees a girl shift from drowning in grief to being flooded by love via a watery world of gods and demons that lies between the rain.  

Just before Halloween, on the cusp of her thirteenth birthday, Marina is struggling with losing her dad — a man who’d loved the sea and believed that down below, in the sea, “are all the dreams and wishes of the world”.

While her sister Seri is confident and sociable, “Marina found it difficult to connect with people. They didn’t seem to want to talk about the things she was interested in... portals and magic islands, gods and dreams that lived in the sea”.

Then, on the first anniversary of their dad’s death, Marina’s mum doesn’t wake up. In fact, all the grown-ups in their village in the west of Ireland remain asleep, except for a strange woman named Ursula, who tells them she’s their grandmother. But, Marina muses, “If Ursula was really their grandmother, where had she been all these years?... Why had Ursula told them a weird story about gods instead of trying to figure out why their mum and so many other people were asleep?”

Feeling overwhelmed, when a voice calls Marina, she runs and runs through the rain and finds herself “between air and water. She was between worlds. She was between the rain”.  In this world, Marina meets a boy who warns her, “There’s danger there, danger and stagnation. That’s the worst thing that can happen to you, other than drowning, of course. Stagnation. That means getting stuck”.

Though Marina is stuck in limbo by grief and, for the time being, also stuck in this in-between world, her journey home will flood the souls and lift the hearts of thoughtful readers.

Joanne Owen

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