Review: The Boy Who Made it Rain

The Boy Who Made it Rain by Brian Conaghan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I requested this book from NetGalley as the blurb sounded interesting and I was interested in how it would be presented to the reader to make it stand out from other similar novels.

I enjoyed reading this book and found it easy to get into. The first half of the book is told from a number of different characters’ points of view and each character’s voice comes across via a slightly different writing style. Some of the sections were partially written to be read with a Scottish accent in your mind, in a style reminiscent of Irvine Welsh. These sections didn’t work so well for me as I found that they didn’t quite live up to Welsh’s well honed talent for capturing the Glaswegian accent on paper.
Some of the characters were more likeable than others. I particularly liked Rosie, but hated her friend Cora. I quite liked having a love/hate relationship with the characters as I found it made hearing their views more interesting for me as a reader.

The second half of the book is dedicated to hearing Clem’s side of the story. This was my favourite half of the book and the character that I felt most invested in. As the reader I could sympathise with Clem as he adjusted to the new culture of his new area and how he was the outsider for being English and being classed as “posh”. I felt that the writer dealt well with Clem’s new relationships and also with the bullying he was experiencing. I think this is a subject which isn’t often dealt with from a boy’s point of view.

One of the things that grated on me slightly about this book was that it was littered with a large number of quite random popular references from the last five years or so with no thought of how relevant they are in modern culture to teenagers today. It is only a small point, but for the sake of the longevity of the book and future readers I would have liked to be able to pin the references down to a specific period in this time of constant change.

All in all an enjoyable read and I have given it 3.5 stars.


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