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Before the Rain Falls by Camille Di Maio: book review



Before the Rain Falls (2017) is set in Puerto Pesar, Texas, in 2013.

The premise of the story is from the words of Lucretius: ‘the drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.’

Della Lee Trujillo is released from prison, after serving 70 years for the murder of her sister Eula Lee in 1943. Tomas, her husband of two weeks, said he would wait for her. Now in her 90s, she returns home to the border town of Puerto Pesar – ‘The Port of Regret’ – in the heat of Texas. For transport, she hires a young female driver, Mercedes Vega, newly licensed and trying to earn a few dollars. Della’s first visit is to the graves of Eula and Tomas.

Journalist Mick Anders from Boston is in Puerto Pesar, reluctantly, to investigate a portrait of a woman called Eula Trujillo that supposedly sheds tears.

Thirty-year-old Dr Paloma Vega has taken a month’s leave from her hospital work in New York to go to Puerto Pesar to care for her 16-year-old sister Mercedes, and her grandmother Abuela, after her heart attack. On her grandmother’s fridge is a magnet of Eula Lee.

Della Lee is ready to tell the truth about her sister’s death, and Mick Anders is ready to listen. What a scoop, the story of the century, he thinks. ‘Mick’s pen slipped from his fingers … he realized that he hadn’t written down one thing after she’d begun speaking.’ ‘But some things were never meant to be told outside of the people they happened to.’

When Mick meets Paloma their lives change forever. And Della Lee. What is it like to meet the murderer of the Songbird Eula, known throughout the county for her mesmerizing voice?

The story takes readers back to 1943 and the truth, and present day 2013 as nonagenarian Della Lee tries to make sense of her remaining years. Mick and Paloma too have to decide what is now important in their lives, far from their respective career bases – Boston and New York. The town of Port of Regret becomes their personal point of reflection, deliberation, and decision-making as they come face-to-face with loyalty and the truth that binds them.

The writing grates with every uneducated word and every badly constructed sentence, but fortunately the story itself, in parts, is interesting, which should keep readers perservering until the end. Perhaps.





MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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