Nothing but the Rain

Sometimes novellas are just a touch too short and suffer for their brevity when I wish they would run a little longer. Others are so brief as to not really have anything to say at all. This one manages to avoid both pitfalls.

The book is posited as a journal of an older divorcée (maybe widow?) who dislikes people despite being a doctor in a former life. I'm always a sucker for epistolary, but there's an urgency to these extremely short passages that made me sit up and pay attention. Laverne's town has been under a constant rainstorm for an unknown length of time where the water literally wipes away your most recent memories. She's writing everything down in an attempt to stave off losing more memories and her very sense of self.

I enjoy speculative "what if this happened?" fiction when it presents a situation but doesn't overexplain it, and that's what happens here. Laverne conducts some clever experiments on the rainwater, but only discerns enough to flesh out the "rules" of this setting for the reader without showing too much behind the curtain. What originally felt like throwaway worldbuilding tidbits go on to provide context for the magnitude of seemingly simple acts in two specific scenes that would've meant nothing in any other work.

An engaging little read you could knock off in a day. Especially recommend if you enjoy books that have final sentences that make you go "holy shit" and stare off in the distance for a few minutes afterwards.