This review is spoiler-free!
This book was received from the author for review. All opinions are my own.
The Scent of the Rain by Anne Montgomery
Genres: Young Adult
Release Date: March 28th 2017 by Treehouse Publishing Group
Format: Kindle, 386 pages
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Find it here: Goodreads
This book was unlike any I really remember reading before, with the exception of an Ellen Hopkins book I feel like may have related to it in some way. (Don’t ask me which, I’m probably wrong on all fronts there. I just feel like I may have read something by her that was slightly similar, but I’m likely wrong.)
Why is this book unlike any other? Because it takes place in a community of people known as the FLDS, or the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and it’s an area I previously knew very, very little about. In fact, as I was reading this book, I started to do some ‘net surfing around to look for more information, because I found Rose’s (one of the the main characters) lifestyle so intriguing! That aside, though, it did cause me to have some trouble immersing myself into the story enough to feel much when bad things started to happen.
Rose is not our only main character we read the story through. We also have Adan (or Andy), a boy trying to escape foster care and finding some mishaps along the way, and then a multitude of other characters from Trak, the man who finds Adan, and Brooke, a woman working for child protection services that happens to have moved into the area where Adan lands himself in his run. There were also some points where we were seeing things from the POV of other community members, such as the marshal, the prophet, and other minor characters that had a role in the story. Because of this, I found myself having a lot of trouble immersing myself into the story, as I said before, and felt very much like someone outside looking in pretty much the entire time I was reading. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but because of this I took more of an approach to learn about Rose’s community than learn about Rose and what she wanted out of life.
One thing I will note though, Montgomery does a fantastic job of making the people she wants to be creepy, creepy. Ugh. You could tell immediately who the villain character was and boy were they just a ball of ew. You could also tell who the lesser villain character was, and to a lesser extent of who one of the saviors of the story would be, but they had nothing on the main baddy.
Very, very interesting though! I learned a lot about a community I previously barely knew about, and the story itself was a good way to pass the time!
Thanks for reading!
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