Grade level: 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, e, i, s.

Struggling just to get by day-to-day, seventeen-year-old Fern's main source of happiness is the constant reassurance of her hard-working mother, but when her mother suddenly dies Fern must find a way to survive in the real world on her own.

Single mother Elise is completely devoted to her eleven-year-old son. He is her world. But that world is violently and cruelly destroyed in a single, terrifying moment when he is killed in a car accident just outside their home. Suddenly alone in her house, surrounded by suffocating memories, Elise faces a future that feels unspeakably bleak and colourless-and pointless. All Elise can think of is joining her son. But in her final, unspoken promise to him, she realizes she must stay alive until she finds someone to take care of his beloved cat, Persephone. As her unique relationship with this trusting creature grows, Elise is forced to confront her past and find the courage to move forward with her life.

To six-year-old Dori, everything seems possible. To her family and their Peers—secular, left-leaning North American Jews—the young state of Israel seems to offer the same promise, as the starry-eyed kibbutz movement prepares the ground for their ideals of justice and cooperation to take root and flourish. They settle on Eldar in northern Galilee, determined to create a new utopia, but life on this remote hill, three kilometres from the Lebanese border, is far more complex than any of its inhabitants could have imagined. The Last Rain tells the story of Eldar's emergence as a kibbutz through the eyes of Dori, as well as through documentary fragments that take the reader on a labyrinthine journey through the characters' collective past. With humour, sensitivity, and a deep love for the land, The Last Rain follows the coming of age not only of a young girl, but also of a country in the first fraught years of its existence.

Grade level: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, p, e, i, s.