Shilling for Sandra Brown

In my summer reading list, I left out a book I meant to mention. It is by a chick writer, indubitably chick, but this is entirely differet from anything else she has written.

I first heard of Sandra Brown on a flight from San Antonio to Dallas about 12-15 years ago. Bad weather had delayed the flight about 3 hours, and it was still raining and windy in Dallas when we landed. My seatmate was a contented woman who had this realllly goooood book she was reading, and we talked a few minutes before I let her get back to it. And I started getting the books.

Her plots are good and she writes some of the best--and longest--sex scenes I've ever read. Her books have a fair amount of glitz in them. She is huge with women.

"Rainwater" is a very different book. In the author's note, she says she wrote it when she had time between two contracted books. Set in a small Oklahoma town in the late '20s or early'30s, it is filled with historically authentic details. It is both sweet and at times a bit grim. Elements of racial tension, very much a real part of Oklahoma at that time, plays a part. There is no mystery I was puzzling out, and the last page surprised me. It has left a lingering sweetness on my mind.

Try it. I hope she will write more like this. It's a short book. I think I finished it in an evening.