Sing for a Gentle Rain

Atheneum, 1990

Sing for a Gentle Rain is a time-travel fantasy about a high school student named James Winter who is pulled back to the year 1280 where he meets a young Anasazi woman, Spring Rain. Her people are threatened by extinction because of an extended drought. It is Spring Rain’s desperate prayers that bring James back in time. Her grandfather, Anasan is the tribal shaman and leader. He has reluctantly taught Spring Rain their songs of power, but Anasan cannot bring himself to reveal their meaning to a girl, even though she is the last of their line. Their people cannot move forward until Spring Rain has a son who can lead them to a new land. The problem is that there are no young men in their community to father her child. James, himself half-Pueblo, finds many things that he has in common with Spring Rain. For him, a painful discovery of culture and language evolves into a rich love for Spring Rain.

Kirkus, in a pointer review, wrote “This beautifully imagined story is well grounded in what is know of the ancient peoples of the Southwest and in the believable characterization of a bright boy, at odds with his own time, whose circumstances open him to a rich experience that grows out of his complex heritage.”  Roger Sutton, writing for the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, comments that “Both teens are convincingly of their respective times, and their cross-cultural romance is realistically awkward – witness James’ distress when he is asked by the community of elders to engage in a hunting competition to demonstrate his manly mettle.” In the Horn Book, Nancy Vasilakis praised James’s “unobtrusive blending of the real and fantastic….The shifts in time are smooth and plausible, the author’s vivid detailing of scenes giving life to both modern and ancient episodes…. First novelist J. Alison James confers contemporary relevance to a primitive culture through the bittersweet coming-of-age experience of her adolescent protagonists.”

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