FernFolio

Twelve year-old Stephen Majok lives with his sixteen year-old sister, Naomi, and their mother in a small village in southern Sudan. Though civil war rages around them, the villagers are more preoccupied with looking for the first clouds that will herald the rainy season, desperately needed after three years of drought. The village’s herd of cattle, upon which the Dinka people rely. has shrunk to a few thin animals, and their crops of sorgham and corn struggle in rain-parched soil. Yet Stephen’s family, and the rest of the village, remain alert ot the sound of planes overhead which might signal another of the periodic raids upon the village by government troops and rebels alike. They have learned to hide away food and animals, or lose all they have to the soldiers. They have also learned to hide away their sons and daughters, for both sides in the war forceably recruit boys as soldiers and kidnap girls to sell as servants, or worse.
Stephen and his friends Wol and Deng are the only boys who remain in the village, since the others have been taken as soldiers or fled to refugee camps beyond Sudan’s borders. They are responsible for guarding the village’s cattle as it grazes each day. When three cows push through a break in the herd’s enclosure and one is found dead, attacked by a lion, the boys fear the reaction of the cow’s owner, Peter Garang, the richest man in the village, who wants to make Stephen’s sister, Naomi, his third wife. Stephen, in particular is afraid that the man will use the dead cow to force his mother to agree to the marriage. Naomi and Stephen are determined that she will not marry Peter, a man who is old enough to be her grandfather, but Stephen is worried that the man will find ways to get back at his family.
As the boys tend the cattle, one morning, Wol’s mother comes running with news that soldiers are approaching the village. The three boys take food and a goat skin full of water, and run for the trees. When they return, hours later, they find the village deserted except for the bodies of the dead. Uncertain of the fates of the missing, Stephen, Wol and Deng start walking in search of help. Should they go west to the Central African Republic, southeast to Kenya, or east to Ethiopia, for, according to other refugees they meet, nowhere is safe.
Year of No Rain tells the perilous story of three Sudanese boys caught between drought and war. Alice Mead’s book makes the terrible realities of their young lives real in the mind of her readers. Well worth reading!
FernFolio Editor