‘Rain Village’ larger than its first impression
“Rain Village”
by Carolyn Turgeon (Unbridled Books, $24.95)
Carolyn Turgeon’s debut novel finds a young girl who’s mostly ignored at home and mostly ridiculed in her few moments away from it and follows her as she runs away to join the circus. But “Rain Village” is a better novel than that makes it sound. Really.
Tessa Riley is a tiny, sensitive child in a rough family of farmers who are too tired from laboring in the fields to spare much thought about books, education, each other or the outside world. Tessa feels invisible, since, at barely 4 feet tall in a family of hardy working stock, she is too slight to help with the farmwork and is confined to the house all day, “stretching” her tiny frame by hanging from a rod in a window.
But when a beautiful, mysterious stranger comes to the Rileys’ small town of Oakley, Kan., driving all the men wild and the women to jealousy, Tessa is overcome by curiosity and must meet her.
Mary Finn is an exotic, jolting presence who takes over Mercy Library. A gypsy with a dark past, she fascinates Tessa and the rest of the townfolk with her herbs, spells, dark hair and colorful clothing. Though the women are outwardly resentful of Mary, they nonetheless quietly flock to her for love potions, insight into their husbands’ affairs, and homemade concoctions to help various maladies.
Tessa begins to work at the library, ostensibly helping Mary with the town’s records and with keeping track of books, but in reality learning things forbidden to her by her simple, strict father: She learns to read, falls in love with books and learning, and is enthralled by Mary’s tales of the circus and her home, a strange place called Rain Village.
“Little by little I just slipped away,” Tessa says in describing her growing attachment to Mary and shrinking bonds to her family.
She and Mary both harbor secrets – for Tessa, abuse at her father’s hands; for Mary, the death of her first love back in Rain Village under questionable circumstances – and those secrets begin working at them both.
“Rain Village” is the kind of book the reader starts out thinking isn’t very good but by the end realizes it is. Initially unimpressed, this reviewer nonetheless kept turning the page, wanting to see what secrets Tessa would unravel, what drove Mary to such despair, whether the novel’s diminutive heroine would find what she wanted, and, once she did, whether she would chuck it all anyway.