When Stars Rain Down by Angela Jackson-Brown

Susanne’s Review:

Beautiful. Emotional. Expressive. Heart-wrenching. 

Opal Pruitt is Seventeen, soon to be Eighteen in the Summer of 1936. On the cusp of adulthood, Opal has never kept company or been the victim of violence, but she’s about to experience both.   

Living in a neighborhood called “Colored Town” in Parsons, Georgia, racism, and segregation run rampant.  No one is safe from the KKK, not even kind, hard-working, well-respected families who keep to themselves.

Opal and her Granny keep house for Miss Peggy, who treats them like family or close to.  The work makes Opal and her granny proud and provides a stable income to boot. For Opal, having the love and support of her granny and the rest of her family is almost enough. The only other thing she wants is to marry a good honest man. Though her granny isn’t quite ready for Opal to do so, she begins keeping company with a young man from Colored Town who has big dreams and a huge heart. 

When tragedy strikes, everything is torn asunder.  Families, friendships, and relationships are destroyed.  

Teardrops fell.  

Truth is, big, fat tears, rolled steadily down this girl’s cheeks.  

What can I say?  My love for “When Stars Rain Down” by Angela Jackson-Brown knows no bounds. The writing, the characters, and the storyline gripped me from the first sentence and didn’t let go till the last. My heart still aches for the characters in this novel and I think it will for a while.

The writing here is lovely, lyrical, and poetic. “When Stars Rain Down” broke my heart and yet, I loved it desperately.  It will most assuredly appear on my Goodreads best-of-list for 2021. For me, the character development is the backbone of this story as I adored the characters of Granny and Opal. Though this novel contains a difficult subject matter, it is brilliantly done and I highly recommend this powerhouse of a novel to lovers of character-driven literary fiction and historical fiction.

Thank you to Netgalley, Thomas Nelson, and Angela Jackson-Brown for the arc. 

Published on Goodreads on 2.1.21.