Customer Reviews

Salt Rain

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I really loved Salt Rain. The prose was soft and haunting. The plot moved surprisingly fast without you even noticing it. The motif of water and blood sort of made me feel like I was floating through the story.

Allie is a 14 y.o from Sydney with a deeply troubled young mother. When Allie's mother goes missing, her aunt, who works on a farm in the rainforrest in Dorrigo (?) comes to collect her. And so we follow all the characters in the small valley town in Dorrigo as they get on with their lives and reminisce about Mae, Allie's mother. Mae is in many ways the central character although she is never on scene. The writing is really evocative of the place and truly I would recommend this book to anyone.

I am so glad I read it. Not my usual genre or taste but really worth the read.

This is a very small story, revealed in an oblique way. A fifteen year-old girl returns to her mother's childhood home after her mother's death to unearth secrets. But what makes this novel fascinating is that it's almost completely a book of the senses. Information is felt, smelled, touched. We know people have emotions about what's taking place, but those emotions are all manifested physically. Characters emotionally react to events and revelations with their bodies, by running or hitting or climbing trees. Allie seeks her dead mother through finding her mother's "First Love," knowing that the essence of her mother's living body will somehow be present on his. When Allie overhears the details of her mother's death, she is literally crushed to the floor.

It is all so heavily sensory. The sensations of wet clothing, mud between toes, the weight of a hand on a thigh or a shoulder, it's all perfectly rendered as a means to convey the emotional truth of what's going on. Through it all, the rain and imminent flooding keep building and rising, because this is a novel of water, of the rivers, the rain, the ocean, the harbor, even amniotic fluid. Salt Rain is an extremely beautiful book about finding the truth of who you are within your own body. I recommend it highly.

It's the rainy season far to the North of Sydney in the New South Wales hinterland. Flooding of the creeks and riverbeds is not just expected, it's almost a given. With the roads cut off and the cane fields in danger of flooding, the rain overflows in curtains from the gutters of small weatherboard houses and drenches the tall weeds growing high and luxuriant against back fences.

Fourteen-year-old Allie finds herself holed-up in her aunt Julia's dairy farm, bought up from Sydney against her will. Somehow she had agreed to pack a bag and get on the train and now she's cut-off from the outside world, desperately wanting to return to the City. Allie aches for her mother Mae, who has mysteriously gone missing and is believed to have drowned in Sydney Harbor.

Allie knows her mother was a good swimmer; they swam in the Harbour all the time, and she just can't believe that Rae would just leave her like this. Now ensconced in her Mother's childhood home with Julia as her temporary guardian, Allie is forced to confront some difficult truths about her mother's mysterious past and ends up facing harsh revelations of her own childhood.

Just after Allie is born, Mae escaped to Sydney, and ended up living a discontented restless existence in the arms of a man who abused her. Growing up around her mother, Allie always wondered who her father was, but Mae was reluctant to tell her the truth, her pregnancy always shrouded in secrecy and mystery. Allie believed what Mae said about her father, and that he was a wondering hot-air balloon operator at country shows whom one afternoon hurriedly seduced her.

Allie is convinced that the handsome Saul, the son of a local dairy farmer, holds the key to her father's identity. Determined to have Mae's stories laid out and have the threads of them pulled apart in front of everyone, Allie finds comfort in Saul who had a special friendship with Rae and was even considered her "First Love." She's drawn to the smell of him, "the salty sweat and the soft fleshy curl of his ear, this warm touch of his hand," yet all she really wants is his memories of Mae.

Sexy and good-looking, Saul is attracted to Allie, he sees a mirror image of her mother, and the girl's presence at his house begins to re-ignite years of protracted passion. After all these years, he still longs for Mae, remembering the feel of Mae's body, remembering the stories of how they made love, "his hands holding her so tenderly, the motion of their bodies together."

These characters are looking for absolution that can never be given. Allie is forced to confront her past and make sense of her present, and cope with her bourgeoning sexual attraction to Saul - a man twice her age. Scraps of old memories keep flooding back to Julia upon Allie's arrival - the day Rae hurriedly left, with her baby. Saul, for his part, finds comfort in working his body after he found out Mae was having the balloon man's baby, he just wanted "the sweat to slough the longing for Mae from his cells."

Author Sarah Armstrong's prose is languorous and sensual, the motif of rain reappearing constantly throughout. There are so many extraordinary phrases, shrewd observations and poetic insights that it is almost impossible not to be touched by this novel. The rain forever connects Allie and Rae - she feels the same rain that had fallen on her mother's skin - "the raindrops making an endless circuit from earth to clouds;" the rain salty on her tongue, "like tears and like blood, and for a moment she could taste her mother;" and the rain falling day after day, coming to soothe and contain Allie, "the clouds rest in the steep valet walls, holding her fast."

Salt Rain is undoubtedly Australian literary fiction at its best. It's a quiet, introspective, and gorgeously written novel, the author constantly bombarding the reader with a wealth of stunning images: the rain-pocketed water, the misty clouds moving down the valley, and the tree trunks slicing the satiny surface of the water.

For most of her life, Mae had tried to keep her daughter "inside that safe watery place," sheltered from the harsh realities of life. But Allie is steadily growing up, she's becoming a woman and her journey is just as much one of self-knowledge as it is finding out the truth about her beloved mother's mysterious and cloudy past. Mike Leonard April 06.