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Year of No Rain by Alice Mead is a story of children and civil war.  So right away you know it’s a sad book.  But yet it’s one of hope, determination and optimism.

Eleven-year-old Stephen Majok lives in a small Sudanese village.  When he is not playing with his friends he tends his family’s two cows. His father had become a soldier when he was just a baby and had never come back.  One of his best friends, fourteen-year-old Wol, becomes engaged to his sister.  He wants to marry before he joins the guerrillas in southern Sudan fighting against the northern government soldiers simply so she can remember him. It’s a war that Stephen doesn’t want to go looking for, he just wants to study but with the war school hasn’t been in session for over a year.

But the war soon finds him anyways, as his village is bombed from government soldiers.  His mother tells him to pack his back with his most valued possessions and run into the forest with his friend Wol.  His mother and sister stay behind.  In the forest, they face hunger, thirst,  and fear that their family has been killed.  Orphans they yearn for home but wander unsure of where to go or who to trust.

A story of how children are caught up and affected in a horrible war.  Stephen is a character whom readers can easily sympathize with.  It’s easily written and perfect for young readers who are discovering the stories of people outside of their life circle and culture.  It’s one that will elicit discussion about the ill effects of war, brutality, hunger, thirst, and the power of the individual, optimism, and the hunger for stability, family, love, and education.

Links of interest: Alice Mead website, more book blogger reviews. I read this book as part of the water theme for the Social Justice Challenge.
Genre: Middle Grade Fiction, approx ages 9-12.
Publisher: Perfection Learning. January 2005.
Hardcover, 129 pages. ISBN 0756951585
Source copy: Own
Year of No Rain is available from your favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s, and Amazon.

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