SUMMER OF NO RAIN

In this YA novel, a multiracial girl finds herself the subject of strange medical experiments in rural Alabama.

It’s the summer of 1968. Heat and drought have dried out the fields around Hyssop, where 12-year-old Margaret Ann Odom lives with her Black Cherokee mother, M’dear. Margaret Ann’s father, though she doesn’t know him, was White. One day, Claire Whitehurst, a White social worker from the just-opened Free Women’s Clinic, offers to enroll Margaret Ann in a program of “preventative medicine.” It involves weekly injections, and though M’dear doesn’t quite understand what they are for, she allows Margaret Ann to begin the treatment. Margaret Ann, for her part, is suspicious: “Why did this White woman think I wasn’t healthy? I thought I was healthy. I hadn’t had my monthlies yet, but I’d heard girls at school talk. Some had. Some hadn’t. ‘This about my monthlies?’ I cut my eyes under my brows to glance at my mother.” Margaret Ann is right to be wary, since none of the other kids in her class have to get the shots, and the clinic is housed in a long-abandoned building. The medicine, whatever it is, causes Margaret Ann to feel depressed, but the truth behind the treatment is even darker than she can imagine. The majority of the book is narrated by Margaret Ann, and Hunter gives her a poet’s eye for the world around her: “I once picked up an old burl out of the cow pasture and took it home. It had circles inside circles inside circles. Interesting how a mistake of nature can make something so beautiful. I understand now that’s my life. You live in the center of circles, each washing away from the other, like ripples in the cattle pond near the ridge.” Some readers may be turned off by the use of dialect and discussions surrounding skin color and hair texture, particularly given that the author is White. But the novel is based on a true story, one that many readers likely have never heard of, and Hunter tells it in a way that highlights the horrors.

A lyrical but always unsettling, sometimes uncomfortable tale of medical experimentation in the 1960s South.