Lightning In a Drought Year

Written by Michelle Black

Narrated by Kris Faulkner

A forbidden friendship turns to love amidst the social and economic turmoil that would lead to the Populist Uprising. As women seek political equality with men, an unlikely herione steps forward to make history. When her father's death forces Laurel McBryde to leave her beloved childhood home in the Flint Hills to live with the Hartmoors, a prosperous banking family, she feels like a lonely outcast among the prim and proper Victorians of Chisholm, Kansas. Soon a growing attraction to radical politics and to Carey Fairchild, a tenant farmer on Hartmoor land, change Laurel's life forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books in Motion
• Release date: Mar 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781614533245

Michelle Black

Michelle Black divides her time between Kansas City and a log home in the mountains of Colorado.  She was born in Kansas and studied anthropology in college.  She created her first “book,” an illustrated survey of ancient Olmec art, as her undergraduate thesis. She went on to law school and graduated with honors. In 1993, she moved to Colorado and began to focus on her fiction writing.  For three years, she owned a bookstore in Frisco, Colorado, a small town nestled high in the Colorado Rockies at 9,000 feet, where she resided with her husband and two sons. In September 2003, Tom Doherty Associates published her novel of historical suspense, The Second Glass of Absinthe, under the Forge imprint.  Set in 1880 Leadville, Colorado, the story unfolds against the backdrop of the town's first labor strike.  The shocking murder of the heiress owning Leadville's wealthiest mine unleashes all sorts of intrigue and scandal.  The title is taken from a quote by Oscar Wilde (who once visited Leadville but does not make an appearance in the novel). The story touches on many facets of Leadville life including the Victorian obsession with the occult. Solomon Spring, Absinthe's predecessor, was published in 2002, and was released in paperback in 2003. Though primarily an intriguing mystery novel, the story tackles many social issues enmeshed in the commercial exploitation of a sacred Native American shrine which actually existed on the Kansas prairie and was thought to have miraculous healing properties by white men and Plains Indians alike. Her previous historical novel, An Uncommon Enemy, a story set during the early years of the Plains Indian Wars, was also published by Forge in the fall of 2001.  The book was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award given by the Center for the Book. While researching that novel, she began to study the Cheyenne language and became involved in the movement to save our Native American languages from extinction.  In 1999, her company, WinterSun Press, began to publish a Cheyenne language course called “Let's Talk Cheyenne” in a not-for-profit collaboration with a linguist on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana.  The course was so successful that in 2002, it outgrew her small press and she negotiated to have the project taken over by a national publisher. She is a former member of the board of directors of Women Writing the West, a national organization of writers and other professionals who are writing and promoting the Women's West.  Her leisure time activities include snowboarding, horseback riding (she prefers an Australian saddle), collecting Absinthe spoons, and building Victorian dollhouses that resemble the ones she describes in her novels.

Reviews for Lightning In a Drought Year

[tracyrowan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

On the great prairie lands of the United States, in the late 1880s, Laurel McBryde's life with her widowed father is exactly what she wishes it to be. She reads, makes photographs and is treated as an equal by her father. But when he dies on her twenty-first birthday, leaving her in the hands of her mother's family, Laurel's life changes radically. She is expected to marry, and to that end the Hartmoors press her to give up her most unfeminine behavior, her radical ideas and her belief that she is the equal to any man. Only one man in Chisholm appreciates Laurel for what she is, and he is not only married and of a different class, but there is a shadow over his past that threatens even their friendship.Boy, can Michelle Black write! Her "Lightning in a Drought Year" is a tremendously moving, compelling novel about life in gilded-age Kansas. The plot is simple; it's a coming-of-age story involving the best sort of romantic heroine, a woman who has learned to think for herself, and it requires her to butt heads with those who uphold the status quo. But while her presence changes them, as it will in all good novels of the type, they change her as well, and this is tremendously refreshing because it acknowledges that any person at any age, no matter how enlightened they may seem, can have room for change and growth in their lives. Watching Laurel come to care for a family which at first seems horrid and stifling is one of the joys of this book. The story is told with a less-is-more restraint that compels readers to do a lot of the work for themselves, to bring their own feelings and experiences to the act of reading, which I find the most satisfying sort of storytelling.One of Black's major strengths is characterization. She doesn't show her hand too quickly, but is careful to remain in Laurel's point of view, allowing the reader to see and understand only what Laurel does. Moments of extreme discomfort are broken by touches of unexpected kindness and humor, which are in turn squashed by rigid attitudes and expectations. It's an effort to get to know the Hartmoors, but the effort pays off. By the end I might not have agreed with any of their attitudes, but I felt a true affection for them. They are sublimely human and prone to all the human weaknesses as well as strengths. They do things for selfish reasons, but when a situation calls for selflessness and honesty, they come through, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes with infectious good humor. By comparison, Carey Fairchild, Laurel's lover, is not quite as well drawn as the others, but that's not necessarily a drawback. He's a nice change from the overwhelmingly masculine, square-jawed, often obtuse but always in control romantic hero who has become an awful cliché in romantic fiction. Carey is fallible, weak and strong by turns, loving, selfish, thoughtful and thoughtless, and if we don't see as far into him as we do the Hartmoor family members it is perhaps because Black is so consistent in her point of view that we perceive him through Laurel-tinted glasses which see the faults, but make them look smaller. As for Laurel, she's refreshingly girl-next-door. I was with her the whole way; never once did Black lose me with inappropriately gushy descriptions of her beauty, her brilliance or her spunk.Michelle Black is a treasure; she has a strong, sensible narrative voice, an eye for believable characterization and the ability to make the most out of a simple plot. On the strength of this book, I've ordered the e-book version of her previous title "Never Come Down."