The Color of Rain
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
If there is one thing that seventeen-year-old Rain knows and knows well, it is survival. Caring for her little brother, Walker, who is "Touched," and losing the rest of her family to the same disease, Rain has long had to fend for herself on the bleak, dangerous streets of Earth City. When she looks to the stars, Rain sees escape and the only possible cure for Walker. And when a darkly handsome and mysterious captain named Johnny offers her passage to the Edge, Rain immediately boards his spaceship. Her only price: her "willingness."
The Void cloaks many secrets, and Rain quickly discovers that Johnny's ship serves as host for an underground slave trade for the Touched . . . and a prostitution ring for Johnny's girls. With hair as red as the bracelet that indicates her status on the ship, the feeling of being a marked target is not helpful in Rain's quest to escape. Even worse, Rain is unsure if she will be able to pay the costs of love, family, hope, and self-preservation.
With intergalactic twists and turns, Cori McCarthy's debut space thriller exists in an orbit of its own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McCarthy's bleak debut novel delivers readers into Earth City, "the most forgotten planet in the universe," where Rain White and her 12-year-old brother, Walker, are orphaned. Lo, a prostitute, takes them under her wing and encourages Rain to sell her body to avoid scrambling for survival. Walker is also infected with a disease that decays the mind; Rain's desperation is heightened by the fear that police will discover Walker's condition and send him away with the rest of the "Touched." On this lawless future Earth, power falls to those who can readily escape the planet like Johnny, an attractive starship captain who offers to transport Rain and Walker to a region called "the Edge," where an alleged cure for Walker's condition awaits. However, Johnny's assistance comes at a cost: his personal possession of Rain. McCarthy's poetic language glows throughout her descriptions of a desolate and melancholy universe. Psychological and physical torture, gruesome deaths, and sexual slavery create a dense, claustrophobic narrative that may require even mature readers to come up for air. Ages 13 up.
