Scattered Showers: Stories by Rainbow Rowell

Hardcover version

 

Rainbow Rowell has won fans all over the world by writing about love and life in a way that feels true.

In her first collection, she gives us nine beautifully crafted love stories. Girl meets boy camping outside a movie theater. Best friends debate the merits of high school dances. A prince romances a troll. A girl romances an imaginary boy. And Simon Snow himself returns for a holiday adventure.

It’s a feast of irresistible characters, hilarious dialogue, and masterful storytelling—in short, everything you’d expect from a Rainbow Rowell book.

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Scattered Shower : Stories

Author : Rainbow Rowell

Published year: 2022

Language : English

Pages : 288

Genre : Short Stories, Romance, Fiction

I'm on a quest for hopelessly romantic stories with characters who learn from their past, and Rainbow Rowell has never failed to deliver. So, I picked up Scattered Showers with high expectations.

Several years ago, whenever I saw a new Rainbow Rowell book in a bookstore, I would buy it without a second thought. That's how much I trusted her as an author. Then, somehow, I stopped seeing her books on bookstore shelves over the last couple of years—or perhaps I simply wasn't paying attention anymore. Maybe it was because I thought she had shifted her focus to fan fiction. It's not the author's fault; I simply can't enjoy fan fiction. I once tried reading a highly acclaimed Pride and Prejudice-based fan fiction, but I struggled to get through it. Ever since, I've given up on the genre.

However, Scattered Showers is exactly what I would describe as a warm cup of coffee on a rainy day. It's comforting, cozy, and quietly intriguing, especially the final story. The collection contains nine stories featuring female protagonists at different stages of life: a high school romance, a college fling, a woman in her late twenties reconnecting with her childhood neighbor during the COVID-19 lockdown, a text-message exchange between women in their late forties, a fan-fiction story, and even a surreal romance between fictional characters waiting to be written.

I don't know whether this was intentional, but I found Rainbow Rowell almost playfully showing off her versatility. She writes women of different ages without ever losing authenticity. Her 19-year-old characters genuinely think and behave like 19-year-olds, while her older characters feel equally convincing. The emotional conflicts, romantic expectations, and level of maturity all match their respective stages of life.

Although these are short stories, they still carry emotional depth, especially the one set during the pandemic. It follows a cautious young woman who quarantines herself for two weeks before visiting her grandfather, who lives alone. After spending so much time isolating herself because of the constant risk of COVID-19 exposure, meeting a kind and attractive stranger feels both exciting and terrifying. It was surprisingly relatable. Years from now, younger readers who never experienced lockdown may read this story and get a glimpse of how nerve-racking it felt to meet another person after months of isolation. Sometimes we don't realize how much we crave human connection until it's taken away.

Then there's the final story, In Waiting, which completely stole the show for me. It follows Anna, a fully developed character created by an unseen author, who has spent years waiting in a limbo-like world before her story is finally written. One day she meets James, another fully developed character who has just arrived. As someone who has been there for years, Anna introduces James to the strange rules of their world. While waiting to become part of someone's story, they slowly fall in love and begin creating a story of their own. I found the premise incredibly refreshing. Rainbow Rowell imagines the place where fictional characters exist before they ever appear on the page, and it's such a clever concept.

Several stories are also loosely connected to Rainbow Rowell's previous books, such as Fangirl, Attachments, and the Simon Snow universe. Although I've read those books, I barely remembered the characters without looking back at my old notes and reviews. So if you don't recognize the references, you're definitely not alone. Thankfully, these stories stand perfectly well on their own and don't require any prior knowledge.

Overall, I really enjoyed Scattered Showers. Not only is it a comforting, feel-good read, but I also admired how Rainbow Rowell managed to build so many different worlds within just a few pages. There's even a whimsical story about a mud princess and a man, which I found wonderfully bizarre and oddly thought-provoking. This collection didn't give me the butterflies that some of her novels did, but I still savored every story with a smile on my face.