Apple and Rain by Sarah Crossan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The great grace of Crossan’s writing was made very clear with her debut, the quite beautiful The Weight of Water , and Apple and Rain is of a similar precise and graceful ilk. It is a very, very beautiful book.
Elegant, subtle and intensely moving, Apple and Rain tells the story of Apple and her family; Apple lives with her Nana after her mother left. Her father’s in a new relationship. And now that Apple’s mother has come home; eleven years after she left, and wants to renew her relationship with her daughter, Apple is caught between the worlds she lives in and the world she so desperately wants to exist.
There are a lot of books about family and the shape of families and how they fit and how they don’t fit, but I don’t think there are many like this. Crossan has a very gentle and subtle style so that we are laced to this story from day one and realise things as Apple realises them. We are with her, handfast, from the first page and that’s quite an intense and wondrous skill. When Apple starts to discover who she is and how she can live and what matters to her, it’s hard to not get emotionally moved and yes, I am using ’emotionally moved’ as a delicate euphemisim for ‘have a bit of a bawl’.
Crossan is on her way to becoming one of the definitive authors of children’s literature and it is a privilege and a joy to be a witness to that journey.
Daisy May Johnson 
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