Beneath A Thousand Skies

Summary:

It begins with a butterfly in chains.

Since the dawn of time, life has been comfortable and predictable. The gods have wrested pockets of Creation from Chaos, formed civilizations, and built entire realities. Now, the nature of Creation is changing and the Divine are losing their divinity.

Rosemary, daughter of the God of Creation, can no longer deny this when a strange delegation from Dawnland braves the paths through Chaos and survives. Come to negotiate trade and protection agreements with the Divine of Meadowsweet, it is the butterfly woman who so captivates Rosemary. The weight of her sorrow, the heaviness of her secrets.

For the soul is a battleground. Clouds are massing along the horizon, and Rosemary…

She must survive the storm.

Holy shit.

This book.

THIS BOOK.

THIS FREAKING BOOK (that has me welling up as I write about it).

I can’t even say that this is going to be my favourite book of the year, because I think this may be my favourite book of all time. Anyone who has followed me for any time at all, will know that my favourite book is another by Sarah Chorn – Seraphina’s Lament, and while it will forever more have a special place in my heart for so many reasons, I think The Necessity of Rain has crept into all the spaces in my heart and stolen its place. I needed this book like plants need water. I had an inkling of that from reading early forms, and certain elements were like having a bell rung in my heart, and the finished book has hammered that point home.

I knew that this book was going to be emotionally devasting. I knew. And yet I was not prepared for the full impact of The Necessity of Rain. This is a book that has distilled the very nature of what it is to be human, and all the complicated, tangled mess that is and transformed it into an artform. This is a beautiful book inside and out, the cover is stunning, and I can’t wait to have a physical copy in my hands, and the chapter headers by the incredibly talent Allegra Pescatore are just the cherry on the top. But the beauty of this book is far more than its appearance. Chorn is undoubtedly known for her prose, and it is truly beautiful in this book, spinning word webs to distil emotion into something so tangible, and so terribly, achingly beautiful that it feels like you could reach out and touch it, and yet don’t for fear of seeing it shatter.

‘We are, none of us, whole, riddled with wounds and trying to plaster them over as best we can. Yet here I had found someone who neither expected me to be strong, nor minded that I was crumbling.’

Before I lose myself in the full depths of this book, I do have to talk about the worldbuilding. Chorn is known for building fascinating, beautifully realised words from the weird west setting of The Songs of Sefate, to the bleak, apocalyptic world of Seraphina’s Lament, but she has well and truly outdone herself in The Necessity of Rain.

Firstly, there is her take on the Divine. I adore books that involve the gods, especially those that are directly involved in the lives of mortals, and Chorn has taken that to a whole new level. Her Divine live, breathe and love and die with their mortals. Their divinity comes at a cost, creation a joy and a burden – and the time to pay the piper for that creation is coming. Who else would sit down and ask who Gods pray too when they are afraid? Or talk about how they love and break, or try to exist when their very nature sets them apart. There is a wonderful moment where one of the Divine confesses to being unable to understand the passage of time, asking for help to learn just that.

Little details, but powerful ones.

Then there are the creations themselves. Meadowsweet is a city of multiple worlds, with many of the Divine having their own arbors within it’s confines. Lands, and peoples that they have sacrificed parts of themselves to create and serve. Honestly, I would love to just read endless stories of those living in those arbors to drink in all the fantastical elements that Chorn has woven into these pages, and the breadth of this is breath-taking. I love that while sometimes we are only afforded glimpses into an arbor as a character travels, but it gives the feeling of a whole, wider world left to explore (something I love to feel in a book), and it also gives us a framework for envisioning the other creations that the Divine who have left Meadowsweet have created. For example, Divine Forge – we don’t see his creation at all, but it is so easy to imagine what it could be. And honestly, that for me was such a strong theme of this book – the power of imagination and memory, from the Divine themselves, to the characters as individuals. The idea that creation and memory stretch on, through life and death and dreams, and that even what might seem forgotten will linger in some in between place.

The Divine themselves are as varied and magical as their creations, with aspects of their individual elements woven into the very physicality of their existence and Chorn manages to balance the otherworldliness with solid characters that we can grasp hold of with both hands. Of the Divine, my favourites just in terms of how their divinity is portrayed must be Father Terra and Divine Forest, but the top spot is taken by Father Luna – by the least ‘human’ of the Divine, the one who has given the most of himself. Perhaps I am little biased because of how his character has developed, but there are beautiful, devasting moments where we are accorded glimpses into how he has become what he is, and he just shines for me.

“Each day my Divinity wanes a bit more, and each day, Rosemary, I feel a little more alive in a way I never have before. Is that not worth celebrating? I understand moments now, my heart, and I cherish them. Will you not cherish them with me?”

Then there is the creeping, growing decline of the Divine as the nature of creation and their relationship with chaos changes. How do gods die? Usually with blood and thunder, and world ending events. Not here. Chorn instead uses the Divine to tread the paths between life and death, to look at the long loss that comes from knowing time is slipping through your fingers like sand from an hourglass, and death the twilight that creeps closer with each passing hour. These otherworldly beings are rendered most human in these moments. Which seems incredibly fitting, after all, what is the Divine, but mortality raised high?

If there is an antagonist in this book, it is change and loss. It is those unstoppable forces that every human has railed against at some point or other. There is no fight against the slow creep of time, of encroaching death, and no matter how much we might fight it, change will occur – some good and some bad. The Necessity of Rain confronts and embraces those elements in their full and in myriad ways, speaking to the variety of human experience.

“Linger in the doorway, uncle. Do not… do not just leave.”

How many of us have had that moment, pleading against inevitability? How many of us have seen loss and the change it brings, and seen it as the enemy, and resented the person who is dying? How many times have we wished we could those last moments over? Maybe not personally, but they are all very human experiences, and here we see them play out on the edge of a knife that cuts. Chorn also doesn’t only look at the change in this sense though, we have a character who is betrayed and saved, torn away from her family and war-torn home and thrust into a new life she didn’t choose; we have a daughter returning home to find that many things are still the same, and she is the one who has change; and another surrounded by looming loss but also promise, and who must change through acceptance and reaching out. Loss and grief are not the province of death alone, and I think that is why The Necessity of Rain will have such a wide-ranging resonance, because even if you have been blessed not to encounter that final grief yet, change is something we all face in some form or another.

“On purpose,” she says. “Always. Forever.”

The Necessity of Rain is also an exploration of acceptance, both fighting it, giving and receiving it and embracing it. From the very beginning we see Rosemary wrestling with her disability, and how she perceived herself and how she feared the Divine would perceive her, which is a thread throughout, and one that resonated strongly throughout. We see Belladonna having to accept how her mother is (and oh, oh that relationship hurt) and that despite the situation she must make a choice in order to live her life. And we see Isra fighting to accept the life that she has now and being confronted with the acceptance of the Divine closest related to her own Goddess and the second chance offered to her.

And we see the Divine accepting their fate. Embracing it even. And there is power in finding that acceptance, especially in self-acceptance, and Chorn channels that throughout all the characters – and we see them bloom and become whole, even in the shadow of death, as they make that journey.

‘Just because I have never seen your like, does not make you wrong. The best songs are the ones I have never heard before.”

Coming back to what I said about Rosemary, I absolutely can’t not talk about the representation in this book. This is an element that I have always loved about Chorn’s work and again it feels like she has taken it to new heights in this book. There is so much to this character, and this is just one of the many threads that have made her such a compelling character, but how it is done, from how she wrestles with it, how others react to it – both negative and positive – to the adaptations, are done with just so much grace and care. This is not limited to Rosemary either, we see several of the Divine in various stages of their life who have limitations and adaptations that need to be made, and it’s a part of this world and story without a second thought. There is also a consideration of serious illnesses, and dementia and not just of those who are enduring those conditions and the impacts and changes that has brought to their lives, but to the effect it has on those around them. (It was the relationship between Rosemary and her mother, that told me I needed this book). Everything is a ripple, one that feeds into another, and sets off another set of ripples, and no one ripple dominates.

Then there are the relationships, because this is also very much a love story – and what could be more true of human life. No matter what else is happening, love – whether platonic, familial or romantic – is always going to be part of that, and Chorn delves into just what that can mean. From the negative, a love twisted by loss, or abandoned because a choice had to be made, to the positive – the acceptance of a child, the reunion of lovers, to that of finding the family meant for you. One of my favourite relationships is that of Muse and Rosemary (there is a scene early on between them that had me welling up); and another is the one between Isra and Divine Forest. And of course, at its heart this is the story of Rosemary, Isra and Belladonna, and Chorn has woven a beautiful, complex relationship between them, and the end of the book left my heart warm with hope for them.

The characters in this book are all wonderfully realised, and even the ones I dislike (side-eyes a certain parent) are compelling because the depth of the emotion is there, and you can see how everything has come to where it’s at. Rosemary, Isra and Belladonna undoubtedly steal the show, and it would absolutely not be the same story without any one of them, they are all as essential as the others. However, I think if I had to choose an absolute favourite character in this book, my heart has been well and truly stolen by Divine Forest. I’m not sure whether it’s his calm acceptance of the fate that is befalling him, or the fact that in the face of that creeping loss he reached out and offered hope to Isra. The chapters with him were absolutely some of my favourites, and there is a scene in his arbor with the people that live there, that just absolutely devasted me.

‘I picture this room, empty. My life, bereft. The world so large and frightening and I, alone to face it. No safe harbor. No port in the storm.’

The Necessity of Rain is a meditation on the many faces and forms of grief. Chorn has always had an immeasurable talent for opening up the human heart and exposing the myriad colours of emotion to her readers, but in this book, she has outdone herself. This an intensely personal book, and yet it will speak to everyone in some way, because its heart carries everything that is so essential to our experience. There were so many points that resonated with me on a personal level, and it is the kind of book that will speak differently to each and every reader.

While this book is a devasting read, especially when it finds those points of resonance. It is also a book about hope, and acceptance and of life not just enduring and surviving but moving on and thriving. ‘Nothing ever ends, it just changes’ is repeated throughout, and really if you want to cut open the heart of this book, that is the key message. Death is a change. Life is a change. Moving on is a change. Asking for help is a change. Accepting yourself or someone else is a change. Change happens, it can’t be stopped no matter how much you might try and stop it, but that does not make it a bad thing.

This is a book that I will revisit in the dark moments, and the light. It is a tender lance for old wounds, a balm against new ones. It is grief and change and life in all it’s rawest forms. As I said in my brief review that first night, this book deserves all the stars in the sky, and is an exquisitely beautiful yet essential read. You’ll need tissues on hand for when you read it, but what you will gain in return is priceless.