Westside Wired was given a free copy of this book by a paying advertiser. 

Come the Rain by Shannon Smiley follows disillusioned teenager Anastasija Volikov. She’s bounced from foster family to foster family, and things only escalate when a violent and mysterious incident in a New York subway lands her in the hospital. Now, she’s headed to a new foster home in rural Constance, NY, and though she’s pessimistic about this new placement and thinks it’ll be just like all the rest, her new foster family has other ideas.

I’m the target audience for Come the Rain, and Anastasija’s story should theoretically resonate with me. For this reason, I was eager to start the novel and submerge myself into its world. There were some distracting grammar errors within my copy that I noticed right away, however. Mix-ups of “your” and “you’re,” malapropisms and strange phrasing caused me to stumble while I read; the comma placement was slightly funky in a few places. Eventually I started to breeze by the mistakes, but in a medium where prose should be — at worst — unobtrusive, I was disappointed by the presence of so many objective mistakes in Come the Rain. The novel could use help from a good editor.

Next, plot. Come the Rain has a solid story with sufficient tension to drive it forward, and I found myself interested in Anastasija’s fate, wondering how she’d adjust to Constance. There’s an unforgettable plot twist that comes along late in the novel that totally blindsided me in the best way — I love it when skeletons pop out of closets in stories. I also thought the climax of the book was strong, with a tense final struggle and a terrifyingly unhinged antagonist. If I had one complaint about plot, it would be that the story dragged in a few scenes for me and that sometimes the characters’ actions did not feel sufficiently motivated.

Now for the heart of any novel: character. As I went through, I highlighted parts that I particularly liked, and nearly all of these were character moments: little bits of dialogue when Anastasija is interacting with her love interest Camron or her foster brother Gib. The small things. A scene where Camron accidentally let it slip that he’d been learning Russian, for instance, was cute.

The novel has a good cast of characters. I did have some trouble relating to Anastasija and her impulsiveness at some points, but maybe that’s because I’ve never been in her situation. There were certainly a lot of details to flesh her character out, and we get a glimpse into the past that motivates her. My favorite detail has to be her eyes: they’re described as “Baikal blue,” a reference to the breathtaking blue ice that appears at Lake Baikal in Russia.

Sadly, not everyone was this three-dimensional. For example, the primary antagonist had no redeeming characteristics at all, and I started to wonder why they hadn’t been arrested or expunged from society years ago. It’s especially maddening because the antagonist has a convincing reason to act the way they do during the climax, so why do they have to be so flagrantly, flagrantly villainous up to that point? It might be a nitpick, but I feel that the story might be improved by demoting the antagonist’s level of evil to something closer to the nuanced reality that young women will have to face. After all, which is more interesting: a horrible villain that everyone hates, or a horrible villain that some people like? (It’s really hard to discuss this without revealing spoilers, but…) At several points in the novel, I was shaking my head over the fact that neither protagonists went to the police or school administration (and even though Anastasija might feasibly resist the idea, there is a character levelheaded enough to think of — nay, insist — on it after what nearly happens to her.) In a world where young women are often blamed for violence they suffer, this might have added an interesting layer to the story.

Finally, let us not forget the obligatory YA romance. I’m not even counting it as a spoiler; you see it coming from 300 yards away — not that this is necessarily a bad thing. Romance is a staple of the genre and of teendom. With all the obsessive Cullens and Greys in the world, I found Camron Corbin to be an good love interest. Anastasija is the one to instigate the relationship, instead of the other way around. He never pressures her romantically. He respects her wishes and boundaries, even if he does push gently for her to open up to him emotionally. With that said, he has a disarming tendency to pop out of bushes and/or bedroom windows as the plot demands, but it didn’t strike me as creepy in context… and besides, Anastasija does her own fair share of creeping.

All told, Come the Rain was an intriguing YA story and it definitely gave me something to chew on, though it lacks the depth/polish of other books I’ve read such as Paper Towns. I’d recommend looking at the preview on Amazon to see if it hooks you in. If a sequel were written, I would be curious but hesitant to read it unless I knew that some of the grammatical kinks mentioned earlier were ironed out.