The World Between the Rain is a bewitching story of loss and being lost then finding yourself again. Magic, the unknown and mysteries beyond human understanding challenge readers to look at grief in a new way and find connections with those they love.
Marina and her family are struggling to cope with loss, each dealing with the pain in their own way. When a strange sleeping sickness spreads through the village making her mother unresponsive, Mavina would do anything to bring her back. The power of the rain and the spaces between the drops enchants her until she finds herself sliding through the raindrops into another world. Is this where she’ll find the answers she needs?
I’m thrilled to welcome author Susan Cahill with a special guest post about the power of weather in her story.
Children’s books and the weather
The rain is definitely another character in my novel. Its strange behaviour is mentioned in the very first line and rainfall is constant throughout the first few chapters before Marina actually falls between the raindrops into another world.
The weather (usually meaning rain) is a constant topic of conversation in Ireland. One of my favourite Irish descriptions of the weather is ‘It’s a grand soft day,’ which means it’s drizzling or misting or raining. Depending on who you’re talking to, the level of rain will change – some people are more tolerant of rain pouring from the heavens than others. Another phrase I came across to describe rain is ‘it’s raining pocketknives with their blades out.’ I heard this from a former boss, whose father used to say it. I gave this to Mrs Flynn, Marina’s neighbour in the novel. It was just too good not to use it. I know I’ve been out in weather that feels just as nasty as that.
But the rain can also be magical. Everything looks different in the rain, more tentative, more ephemeral. And who doesn’t love being curled up indoors on a rainy day, with a book to lose yourself in.
Some of my favourite children’s books also feature weather as a shaping force in the story. Think of the tornado in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or the way winter begins to thaw in Narnia when Aslan is on the move. The snow of The Dark is Rising signals that we’ve entered a time of ancient magic and mist in The Hounds of the Morrigan marks the boundary between our world and the supernatural one. Thrillingly, ‘there was a steady rain falling’ the day that Lucy enters the wardrobe to find Narnia. The weather outside forces the children to explore other possibilities, even a very ordinary looking wardrobe.
When I first read A Wrinkle in Time, I didn’t realise that its opening line ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ was a playful reference to the nineteenth-century novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton or that his use of this line is often mocked as literary cliché. For me as a child reader, the darkness, the howling wind and the biting rain perfectly caught the atmosphere I craved: mysterious, dangerous, and a bit exciting.
And this is also what I was after in The World Between the Rain, to create a feeling that there might be magic in every storm, the possibility of another realm in every raindrop, and that even when we are feeling at our worst, there is always another way to look at the world.
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