Year of No Rain

by Alice Mead
Published in by Farrar Straus and Giroux, in May 2003
Subject: Ethnic conflict, Sudan
ISBN 0374372888

Summary: In the Spring of 1999, eleven-year-old Stephen Majok watches as his friend Wol joins a circle of dancers. Wol, fourteen, is celebrating his engagement to Stephens sister. Wol wants to marry because he might join the guerilla fighters in southern Sudan and fight the northern government soldiers. Stephen thinks Wol is crazy. Children should study. But because of the long civil war, there is no school to go to. All Stephen has from his school days are some books and one precious pencil. Suddenly, but not unexpectedly, bombs are heard in the tiny village. Stephen's mother tells him to hurry and meet Wol and their friend, Deng, in the woods.

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Awards: A Junior Library Guild Selection 2003.

Mark Sedgwick: Alice Mead's novel Year of No Rain is excellent. It is well written, with just the right amount of suspense to drive the story along, and its didactic elements are rarely obtrusive. Yet teach it does--about the realities of life in Southern Sudan, about the Sudanese civil war, and (to a lesser extent) about the inherent senselessness of war. It successfully avoids the oversimplified understandings of the Sudanese civil war that are all too common in America. Click to read the entire review.

Sudan Map

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