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The Scent of Rain Kindle Edition

by Anne Montgomery (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 36 ratings
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Rose Madsen will do anything to keep from being married off to one of the men in her Fundamentalist Mormon (FLDS) community, even endure the continued beatings and abuse of her mother. But when her mentally handicapped baby sister is forced to strangle the bird she loves at the behest of the Prophet, Rose frees the bird and runs away. 

Adan Reyes will do anything to escape the abusive foster care system in Phoenix, even leaving his good friends and successful high school athletic career behind him. Ill-prepared for surviving the desert, Adan hits the road only to suffer heat stroke. Found by a local handyman, he catches a glimpse of a mysterious girl--Rose--running through town, and follows her into the mountains where they are both tracked and discovered by the men of the FLDS community.

With their fates now intertwined, can Rose and Adan escape the systems locking them into lives of abuse? Will Rose be forced to marry the Prophet, a man her father's age, and be one of dozens of wives, perpetually pregnant, with no hope for an education? Will Adan be returned to the foster home where bullying and cruelty are common? Is everyone they meet determined to keep them right where they belong or are some adults worthy of their trust?

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  1. Reading age
    12 years and up
  2. Print length
    300 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Grade level
    7 - 12
  5. Publisher
    Treehouse Publishing Group
  6. Publication date
    March 28, 2017
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Not Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  10. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  11. ISBN-13
    978-0996390149
  12. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Anne Butler Montgomery has worked as a television sportscaster, newspaper and magazine writer, teacher, amateur baseball umpire, and high school football referee. Her first TV job came at WRBL-TV in Columbus, Georgia, and led to positions at WROC-TV in Rochester, New York, KTSP-TV in Phoenix, Arizona, and ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut, where she anchored the Emmy and ACE award-winning SportsCenter. She finished her on-camera broadcasting career with a two-year stint as the studio host for the NBA’s Phoenix Suns. Montgomery was a freelance and/or staff reporter for six publications, writing sports, features, movie reviews, and archeological pieces. Her novels include: The Scent of Rain, Nothing But Echoes, and A Light in the Desert. Montgomery teaches journalism at South Mountain High School in Phoenix, is a foster mom to three sons, and is an Arizona Interscholastic Association football referee and crew chief. When she can, she indulges in her passions: rock collecting, football officiating, scuba diving, and playing her guitar.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07RL8N8Q8
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Treehouse Publishing Group (March 28, 2017)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 28, 2017
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1283 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 300 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 36 ratings

About the author

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Anne Montgomery

Anne Montgomery

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Anne Butler Montgomery has worked as a television sportscaster, newspaper and magazine writer, teacher, author, and amateur sports official. Her first TV job came at WRBL-TV in Columbus, Georgia, and led to positions at WROC-TV in Rochester, New York, KTSP-TV in Phoenix, Arizona, and ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut, where she anchored the Emmy and ACE award-winning SportsCenter. She finished her on-camera broadcasting career with a two-year stint as the studio host for the NBA’s Phoenix Suns. Montgomery was a freelance and/or staff reporter for six publications, writing sports, features, movie reviews, and archeological pieces. Her novels include The Castle, A Light in the Desert, Wild Horses on the Salt, The Scent of Rain, and Wolf Catcher. Montgomery taught sports reporting at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and taught high school journalism for 20 years. She was an amateur sports official for four decades, a time during which she called baseball, ice hockey, soccer, and basketball games and served as a high school football referee and crew chief. Montgomery is a foster mom to three sons and a daughter. When she can, she indulges in her passions: rock collecting, scuba diving, theater, and playing her guitar.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
36 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

PrincessHeadbutt
5.0 out of 5 stars Faced paced, and impeccably researched
Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2018
Verified Purchase
Faced paced, and impeccably researched, The Scent of Rain opens a window into the little-known world of the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints. This book is written in the same spirit as a historical period drama, the characters are completely fictional, but the setting is largely factual. I was shocked and saddened to learn that many of the more disturbing elements of the FLDS community were not fictional plot devises that Ms. Montgomery invented to add drama to her story, but rather alarming facts. From birth defects due to inbreeding to the heartbreaking practice of men "marrying" young girls, the story effortlessly draws the reader into a world that few people know exists and even fewer are allowed to witness. The Scent of Rain is not an easy book to read in terms of subject matter, but it tells an important story. In the midst of the near relentless action of the plot, the reader is also forced to ponder some difficult questions about how our modern culture values children and women, as well as our individual responsibilities towards our neighbors. I will be thinking about this book for a long time.
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Annie Marie
5.0 out of 5 stars Read in 1 sitting - something I NEVER do. Couldn't put it down!
Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2020
Verified Purchase
I thought of CLDS as very kind people who were ardently committed to genealogy. My perspective has now been broadened by this book.
Thank God for people like Brooke, Trak, Chase and Adan who are coded to help other people. Without these characters, it is easy to forget there are good deeds in the world. Anne Montgomery's book, The Scent of Rain, was a page-turner. Filled with complexities of faith, religion, science and human nature, this book took me to remote Arizona and left me thirsty for both water, and the next page.
If you're curious about Mormons, child services workers, small towns and weird cults, this book is rich with characters, landscape and wildlife.
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Debra F.
5.0 out of 5 stars I was hooked immediately!
Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2018
Verified Purchase
I was hooked in immediately. Ms. Montgomery's style and introduction of the characters made for a easy pleasure reading. I look forward to reading her other works as well.
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Anna Baker
5.0 out of 5 stars Don't read it in the dark
Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2017
Verified Purchase
Very disturbing, but also compelling. Montgomery's voice is a no-holds-barred approach to a terrible truth disguised as the love of God. Just the thing for a stormy night's read.
One person found this helpful
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PHX38
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2017
Verified Purchase
Anne Montgomery has a great way of mixing local knowledge of Arizona with excellent story telling!
One person found this helpful
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Donna C
4.0 out of 5 stars Gripping.
Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2017
Montgomery writes a compelling, gripping story about a girl trying to escape a cult and the passive observers around her who are finally forced into action. I couldn’t stop reading and practically swallowed the book whole. Montgomery doesn’t use a lot of flowery, overwritten language to tell her story and sticks to short, succinct passages of time and chapters that make the book feel effortless to read.

It was horrifying to read about the FLDS community up in Colorado City and even more horrifying to know that, while this story was fictionalized, such a cult does occupy the area at the Arizona/Utah border. And yes. These guys are a cult. And just like the first amendment doesn’t protect all free speech, it shouldn’t protect all aspects of religion, especially the abusive, pedophilloic aspects of it. It’s one thing when adults are consenting to this kind of idiocy. It’s quite another when girls as young as 13 for forced into purely procreative marriages with men old enough to be their grandfather while the boys are effectively ejected from their world because they’re useless. When the story went into the POV of the “Prophet” it was grotesque. The man was basically a pedophile and made all the woman under his rule dress in a manner that made them look like children so he could, quite literally, get off. Gross.

Rose’s story was heartbreaking and I couldn’t help but root for her as she slowly broken the chains that bound her. Adan, while a great character whom I liked, felt like a weird insert into this world that didn’t quite fit into this grander puzzle. He fit close enough, but not cleanly so even within the confines of the story he felt like an outsider placed there in order to move the story forward. Didn’t stop me from plowing through the story, but he’s the one slightly off element for me.

THE SCENT OF RAIN asked a lot of valid questions, especially centering around Chase and Trak as they came to terms with what they were seeing. They’ve basically spent their lives being silent approvers of what’s been going on and claiming they didn’t know how far it’d gotten. But when something’s happening right under your nose, how ignorant can you be about it? And these two characters really struggled with that toward the end of the story, including a woman within the cult, Beth, who left and came back and had a hard time swallowing what was going on. A definite (probably unintentional) parallel to what’s happening in our society today. At what point is it too much? How far down the slippery slope can one slide before they’re about to crash into a raging river?

The end was a bit anticlimactic for me. I wish there was more comeuppance for the Prophet than what we received but I guess that’s reality, right? Cut off one head of the hydra and three more grow back. Changing the minds of the indoctrinated is a difficult, nearly impossible, thing.

What really hit me were Montgomery’s notes at the end about how she went up to Colorado City to do research and how eerie everything around her was, especially about the children and how they treated outsiders. It makes my skin crawl.

Montgomery’s THE SCENT OF RAIN is an excellent addition to all of the information out there about the FLDS cults that exists and what’s going on. It’s frustrating to know that is it so difficult to take children out of these environments because of the unwillingness of the adults to testify against the men running their lives. And the inbreeding that’s happening and the children suffering in such awful ways as a result of that inbreeding. It’s horrifying. I don’t think people truly understand that this isn’t about freedom of religion but about the absolute control of a few over many, often to satiate latent sexual desires. It’s gross and these cults shouldn’t be allowed to exist, at least not when children are involved. If adults want to be idiots and do that to themselves, fine. But when children can’t make those decisions on their own they shouldn’t be forced into it.

The only real complaint I have is that the digital copy I received was a bit sloppy. This isn’t a self-published book but it is published with a small indie and it would have benefited from a line edit and formatting checks before being released. I ended up with some missing words in sentences, page numbers in the middle of the text, and scene shifts with no demarcation, to name a few. But I was so engrossed with the story that I was hardly bothered by these things.

4

I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
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Top reviews from other countries

Grandma
5.0 out of 5 stars 5 stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 20, 2020
Verified Purchase
A great read and very well researched. Its not the first book i've read of this kind but this was really top. Ive struggled to put it down. Well done Anne Montgomery
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