A quiet and meditative book that reads like a mystery: How do we find ourselves--sometimes simultaneously--moving both toward and away from the things that matter to us most?
- Johanna Skibsrud, 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize Winner for The Sentimentalists

Is there a worse city in which to suffer a vindictive, litigated break up than unrelentingly sodden Vancouver? In these one hundred intimate chapters, Carellin Brooks has convinced me no. Her forbearing heroine bikes through torrents, dodges puddles, keeps moving through bitterness and weather. Nobody, not even the rain, has such nerve.
-Caroline Adderson, author of Ellen in Pieces

Carellin Brooks' marvellous and brooding novel, sparking after yet another downpour, offers a natural history of rain and breakups. Just as snow-bound cultures have numerous words for different kinds of snow, so the Vancouverite requires many words and varied descriptions for rain. The exquisite descriptions of internal and external tensions are what capture here, what pierce and press the reader forward, j-walking through the tumbling language of rain, dodging in and out of the doorways of these short, sharp, shocked chapters. Carellin Brooks offers a loud and persistent rejoinder to the idea of "the pathetic fallacy" the internal and external do coalesce, and they do so at the apex of the most precise and revealing sentences I have read in years.
- Stephen Collis

Reviews:

"...a memorably profound and stylish portrait of love's complications." - Publishers' Weekly

"...a story of struggle and resilience. It's a tale of one woman's journey to find her way after losing so much, to make a place in this world for her and her son." - Worn Pages and Ink

"In 100 brief and rain-drenched chapters Brooks maps the painful distance from hope (romantic whispers of future anniversaries) to despair (police sirens, lawyers, court dates, loneliness). Between the two states, there's lots of introspection pursuing the age-old question: How did things go so very wrong?" - Brett Josef Grubisic for Daily Xtra - -

"One hundred days of rain in all possible variety (this is Vancouver), side by side with equally subtle shifts in mood described in sparse, poetic prose. It's heavy material but, as with poetry, rewards contemplative reading in quick breaks." --The Globe and Mail

"That the world comes down on us if we make art of it or not is true. Rain as the agent of how much is beyond our control, thus this book opens into such questions as how to fully inhabit both loss and beauty and how to let the natural world save you. Brooks doesn't profess; she asks and observes." --Lambda Literary Review

"A truly snackable book... set in Vancouver, rain's epicentre, and the author uses the many forms of daily precipitation to mirror her deftly wrought tale of stress, heartache and rebirth." --Toronto Star

"Brooks describes a world either lost in or entirely made of rain. It's in these flashes of insight where she gets closest to revealing something essential: all this rain is simply the water we're all swimming in, whether or not we really notice it." --National Post

"A quiet and meditative book that reads like a mystery: How do we find ourselves--sometimes simultaneously--moving both toward and away from the things that matter to us most?" --Johanna Skibsrud, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of The Sentimentalists

"Is there a worse city in which to suffer a vindictive, litigated break up than unrelentingly sodden Vancouver? In these one hundred intimate chapters, Carellin Brooks has convinced me no. Her forbearing heroine bikes through torrents, dodges puddles, keeps moving through bitterness and weather. Nobody, not even the rain, has such nerve." --Caroline Adderson, author of Ellen in Pieces