Title: Smell the Raindrops: One young woman’s journey through life, love and recovery
Author: BA Austin
Publisher: Crescendo Press
ISBN: 978-0-9895047-3-7
Pages: 200
Genre: Memoir
Reviewed by: Ella Vincent
Pacific Book Review Star
Awarded to Books of Excellent Merit
Pacific Book Review
Smell the Raindrops is an inspiring memoir about a woman’s journey growing up in the South during the turbulent times of the Civil Rights Movement. Author BA Austin’s memoir will entertain and enlighten readers. This book is about Bethany Ann Austin’s life in Memphis with her successful family and her loving African-American nanny, Karine. While she and Karine bond, Austin has to witness Karine suffer the indignities of racism. She also has to deal with “funny breath”, Austin’s term for alcoholism in her family. When Austin herself has to deal with the disease of addiction and how it affects her children, her life changes in unexpected ways.
Austin’s writing is very relatable and easy for readers to engage with as well. When she writes about the tragedies in her family or her own personal demons, she writes with a vulnerability that will endear her to readers. She also writes eloquently about how Karine taught her how to respect other peoples’ cultures at a time when minorities were discriminated against in the Jim Crow South. Austin makes the political upheaval of the 60’s personal through her stories about her love for Karine and the African-American churches she attended with her.
Smell the Raindrops also details the complicated relationship she had with her parents. Austin writes about how her struggles with trying to be perfect for her parents caused her a lot of personal trauma. Austin writes eloquently about how her love of her family was constant despite the troubles her family had to survive. The settings in the memoir are described so beautifully as well. Austin writes about the heat in Memphis in her childhood, pine trees in Maine during her college years, and the mountains of California in her adulthood so vividly in Smell the Raindrops. Readers can easily imagine themselves in the places Austin lived.
Smell the Raindrops would be best for fans of heartfelt memoirs like Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, or Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. Austin’s memoir would also be best for readers who like autobiographies about surviving alcoholism, such as Drinking: A Love Story by Carolyn Knapp. Additionally, Smell the Raindrops would be perfect for book discussion groups as well.
This book is a memoir that readers will love. BA Austin has written an autobiography which will show readers the evolution of a woman during a troubled life. Smell the Raindrops is a memoir readers won’t forget.
