When the Rain Came (Volume 1)

Content levels

Trigger warnings

Positive tags

Heroine archetypes

Protagonist archetypes

Tropes

Themes

Synopsis

The rain never stops. The world is drowning. Survival is everything. When the Rain Came is the first YA book in an all-new, action-packed dystopian adventure series by New York Times bestselling author Matt Eicheldinger. “If we stay here, if we keep wandering without a real plan, we won’t last. Maybe The Hill is dangerous. But maybe it’s not. It’s the only plan we have.” Seventeen-year-old Aurora knows how to survive. Life in the foster system has taught her how to stay quiet, stay smart, and stay ready. But nothing could prepare her for this: a never-ending storm that swallows cities, drowns forests, and turns the world into a flooded wasteland. Trapped in a collapsing house with her strict prepper foster parents, Aurora is forced to live by their rules just to stay alive. Until the day they disappear without a trace. Alone. Abandoned. And running out of time. All Aurora has is a waterlogged scrap of paper and a name: “The Hill.” With looters closing in and the floodwaters rising higher each day, she’s left with one impossible choice—stay and wait for the storm to take her, or risk everything on a journey through the drowned remains of the world, to a find a place that may or not exist. It’s forward or nothing. With echoes of Life As We Knew It, The Last of Us, and Hatchet, Aurora’s story is a gripping, emotionally resonant survival story about resilience, found family, and one girl’s fight to reclaim her future in a drowning world.

Tags

Is When the Rain Came (Volume 1) appropriate for my child?

Suitable for most readers 13 and up.

This post-apocalyptic survival story contains moderate peril, abandonment themes, and violence from looters in a flooded dystopian setting. Suitable for mature middle schoolers and teens comfortable with survival narratives.