“Send Down the Rain” by Charles Martin

A new novel by Charles Martin is an event. He’s a grand storyteller, one of the nest writing today. He tells stories, and his characters tell stories. It doesn’t matter if it’s broken children trying to survive, or broken adults trying to survive a plane crash in winter mountains or the pain of life, or a husband still trying to show a dying wife how much he loves her. Charles Martin tells stories of the human heart, the broken human heart ultimately touched by grace.

Send Down the Rain, Martin’s latest published work, is a grand story, and then some. Joseph Burns is 62, a Vietnam veteran. He went to Vietnam as a teen, did two tours, and was involved in special operations all over Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. He doesn’t have to talk about those special ops; he still has nightmares in his sleep.

Joseph lives in a cabin with his dog Roscoe in the mountains of North Carolina. He hears a child’s scream and goes to investigate. A woman and her two children, all illegal immigrants, are trying to escape a Mexican drug lord, right there in North Carolina. Joseph tells them to wait in his cabin, while he leaves for a while. He comes back with the drug lord’s knife. The police later find his body tied in the back of a pickup truck.

He helps the woman find her brother in Florida, not far from where he and his brother Bobby grew up at Cape San Blas, a coastal peninsular in the Panhandle. He and his brother don’t see each other; they occasionally talk. Bobby is a U.S. Senator, a decorated war hero, living the stereotype of the powerful Southern U.S. Senator with connections all over Washington D.C. and the U.S. military. Someone else lives at Cape San Blas – Allie, the girl next door, the one Joseph loves and the one who loved Joseph. 

When Joseph came home from his first tour, he arrived just in time to see Allie and Bobby getting married. He considered killing his brother; instead, he returned for a second tour.

Charles Martin

Bobby and Allie have been long divorced, and Allie is remarried to a truckdriver, man who has just incinerated himself in a tractor-trailer explosion right at Cape San Blas. 

Joseph is still in love with Allie. First loves aren’t easily cast aside, at least for Joseph. But there are complications, a lot of complications. And Joseph Burns is going to confront the demons, real and imagined, pursuing him.

Charles Martin doesn’t write bad stories, or even mediocre ones. He writes about recognizable people, people we know or think we know. Send Down the Rain is filled with these recognizable people, broken and searching for grace, and possibly finding redemption.

Related:

Unwrittenby Charles Martin

Charles Martin’s Where the River Ends

Charles Martin’s The Mountain Between Us

Charles Martin’s Wrapped in Rain

Crying with Them Crickets

Top photograph: The shoreline at Cape San Blas, Florida.

"Hand Me Down the Dawn" by Mary Harwell Sayler

It’s 1895. Catherine Caldwell, known as “Cat,” is 19 years old. She’s digging her father’s grave; her mother died some years before. She hasn’t had much education. The people of the town she lives near think of her as rather odd. With no other family, she decides to fulfill a kind of promise to her mother and heath south to Florida, specifically to Siloam Springs on the St. John’s River, a place she’s never visited but which holds the promise of a better life.

She disguises herself as a boy, wearing her father’s dungarees and boots. She hops a freight train headed south, and after she’s discovered and rather painfully thrown off the train, she meets Raff Jordan. Jordan is clearly a man of the gentleman class, and he is piloting his raft of goods to Siloam Springs with the help of a young local man named Wyatt Tate. For several weeks, the three make their way together on the St. John’s River from Jacksonville. Cat discovers that Jordan is a preservationist – someone deeply concerned by the destruction of Florida’s natural habitats by phosphate ore miners and others.

Cat discovers herself liking Jordan, a liking that grows stronger. But their relationship often seems like oil and water. Once they reach Siloam Springs and the big steamboat docked there, Jordan deposits Cat with the Tate family and takes off. Ma Tate isn’t fooled for a moment – she knows Cat is no young boy. And she helps her get a job working as kitchen help at the local hotel and establishing a double life – kitchen boy cleaning pots and pans and beautiful singer at the hotel.

Mary Harwell Sayler

Cat’s story is told in Hand Me Down the Dawn by Mary Harwell Sayler, first published in 1985 and now updated and republished. Sayler is a poet, editor, and writer whose published books include Living in the Nature Poem, Faces in a Crowd, Outside Eden, Beach Songs & Wood Chimes: Poems for Children, Christian Writer’s Guide, Praise: Poems, and What the Bible Says About Love, among many others. She lives in Florida.

Hand Me Down the Dawn is a historical romance, and Sayler has done her historical and environmental homework in telling Cat’s story. And it is a sweet, winsome story, including enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing if Cat will find the life and the love she’s looking for.

Related:

My review of Lost in Faith: and poetry.

My review of Living in the Nature Poem.

My review of Christian Writer’s Guide.

My review of Faces in a Crowd.

My review of Praise: Poems.

Wallace Stevens and Walking the Landscape – at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph: Lucas New Lines operated steamboats on the Ocklawaha and St. John’s rivers in Florida in the 1890s.