Sandra Brown's "Rainwater" is the story of Ella Barron, a single mother living in a small rural town in the 1930s. She runs a boardinghouse while also trying to care for her mentally disabled 10-year-old son, Solly.

Her life of strict routine and orderliness experiences a sudden — and at first unwelcomed — change when she acquires a new boarder named Mr. Rainwater. Ella's emotions, which she spent years nullifying, are tested by Rainwater's presence. She is further stressed when Solly, whose mental handicap has prevented her from being able to connect or communicate with him, begins to exhibit a response only to this enigmatic man.

There is also turmoil in her hometown of Gilead, as a government program meant to provide relief for Dustbowl farmers affected by the Depression ignites tension and rage among the poverty-stricken of the shantytown and the local authority.

Ella's quest to help those in the shantytown, as well as come to accept her feelings for Rainwater, reopen her once-sealed heart to hope, compassion and love.

Brown beautifully and sorrowfully illustrates an era stricken with grief and desperation, and this same tone is paralleled in the central characters. Each struggles with his or her own personal despair —- depicted in the physical, mental, spiritual and emotional — but only through working together and believing in hope can each survive their hardships.

Ella is a strong woman, acting as a mother and guardian to anyone who lives in her boardinghouse, but the reader can also sense her tenderness and unbreakable devotion to her child that everyone in town ridicules. Rainwater, who remains mysterious through much of the book, is much like Ella as he too has vicious internal battles that he tries to hide.

But all the while he remains patient, kind and generous.

One could say it's appropriate that Rainwater — whose name is heavily symbolic as he helps the town affected by drought — is the perfect match for Ella, whose last name Barron (or "barren") represents a woman emotionally sterile, in need of Rainwater's refreshing optimism and care. There is more subtle symbolism scattered throughout the story, and other characters provide representations of different populations at that time in how they viewed the circumstances of the Depression and how the government was handling it.

I found these moments to be the most intriguing scenes of the novel, particularly in the chapter where the protagonists go to a neighbor's farm after a terrible and grisly scene has occurred, all due to the government program designed to "help" the distraught farmer.

This novel is excellently crafted, powerful and delicate at the same time, just like its characters. My only criticism about it is its rather abrupt — and startlingly disturbing — conclusion, but it works as a final perfect parallel. As one character having read "A Farewell to Arms" comments: "Even knowing the ending was sad, I wouldn't have deprived myself the beauty of the story."

Alison Reeger Cook is a Gainesville resident whose Off the Shelves book review runs every other week in Sunday Life. Know of a good book to review? E-mail her to tell her about it.