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Publisher: Thomas Nelson (April 13, 2021)

This summer has the potential to change everything.

The summer of 1936 in Parsons, Georgia, is unseasonably hot, and Opal Pruitt can sense a nameless storm coming. She hopes this foreboding feeling won’t overshadow her upcoming eighteenth birthday or the annual Founder’s Day celebration in just a few weeks. As hard as she works in the home of the widow Miss Peggy, Opal enjoys having something to look forward to.

But when the Ku Klux Klan descends on Opal’s neighborhood of Colored Town, the tight-knit community is shaken in every way. Parsons’s residents—both Black and white—are forced to acknowledge the unspoken codes of conduct in their post-Reconstruction era town. To complicate matters, Opal finds herself torn between two unexpected romantic interests, awakening many new emotions. She never thought that becoming a woman would bring with it such complicated decisions about what type of person she wants to be.

In When Stars Rain Down, Angela Jackson-Brown introduces us to a small Southern town grappling with haunting questions still relevant today—and to a young woman whose search for meaning resonates across the ages.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

My pastor, Reverend Perkins, said just this past Sunday that if this heat was a clue of how hot hell was going to be, we should all be lining up to get rebaptized.

 

You ain’t got the good sense God gave a billy goat. You think them Kluxers is scared of the likes of you? Get somewhere and be still.

 

Do you know when folks say they saw stars when someone kissed them, and it always sounded silly or downright crazy? Well, I promise you, when Cedric kissed me, it was like the heavens opened up and all the stars rained down to the earth.

 

All of their faces looked like the worst kind of storm clouds. It was like what was going on outside with the rain and the wind had entered into our little house. I felt drenched with the emotions we were all feeling.

My Review:

 

I tumbled right into this book and was so deeply immersed in this clever author’s words that every time my eyes were forced from my Kindle I was momentarily stunned to realize I wasn’t in Georgia. I kid you not, my skin is so fair I am practically an albino but while reading this absorbing missive I was an exhausted seventeen-year-old black girl residing in the segregated and rural Deep South during 1936 while living in fear of the KKK.   I was entranced, enthralled, and riveted to the sharply-honed and tension-filled narrative.  I sobbed when Opal was devastated and felt her elation and losses as keenly as if they were my own. Angela Jackson-Brown is a masterful storyteller with serious word voodoo. Somehow, five stars just doesn’t feel like enough, ten seems far more accurate.