Rules of Rain by Leah Scheier (review)

Rain has had sixteen years of being her autistic twin brother Ethan's therapist, coach, and protector, and she's planning a future of more of the same. Even when she begins a relationship with her lab partner, Liam, who plans to depart their small Montana town as soon as possible, Rain can't imagine leaving her brother. Her anxiety ramps up as Ethan and her best friend, Hope, start dating and as her mother's medical issues bring Rain's estranged father back into her life—along with the news that Ethan has been regularly seeing him all along. Scheier captures with canny sympathy the viewpoint of a girl whose life has been wrapped around her brother's and who doesn't realize how much that has limited him as well as her. However, the book falls into cliché both in making Ethan a medical savant and in punishing Rain for her first and only sexual experience with an ectopic pregnancy, and the climactic scene of Ethan taking Rain to the hospital mid-blizzard is deeply contrived. Interspersed posts from Rain's food blog are pretty bland, and the outof-the-blue culinary opportunity it ends up providing is cinematically far-fetched. There's still emotional truth in the core of the novel, though, and readers with their own family challenges may relate to Rain's difficulty in letting go. DS