Rain Breaks No Bones
Set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, this entry concludes the Morgan family story in the mid-1950s. Violet still mourns the death, forty years ago, of her nine-year-old sister, “our Daisy,” and the message from Zethray Jones, a spirit medium who walks with ghosts, makes her newly conscious of the secret she has withheld from her daughter, Daisy, her sister’s namesake. In 1955, Daisy is about to celebrate her 25th birthday, opening a studio where she plans to teach dance and voice, and grandma Grace’s Tom Thumb piano is going with her. But the movers abandon the unwieldy instrument on the street at the bottom of the studio stairs, in favour of a quick thirst-quencher! Johnny Cornell, a Black part-time musician, can’t resist the pull of the ivories on his way past, much to Daisy’s annoyance, until they get talking and a friendship blossoms, turning quickly to love. Daisy is head over heels, but how will she explain Johnny to her mother?
This evocative novel is everything a reader could want in a family saga: love, loyalty and secrets, which, through seemingly necessary lies, get larger and larger, making coming clean exponentially more difficult. This is the third in Taylor’s Scranton series, novels interconnected by family which are very enjoyable as standalones. With superb descriptive detail, the atmosphere is steeped in the time period, and the inherent risk involved in interracial relationships is explored with care. The ghost of “our Daisy” humorously stalks Zethray with messages, until mortal danger to the contemporary Daisy intervenes to bring about a climactic conclusion. It’s easy to feel drawn to these people living ordinary lives in a mid-century America on the cusp of great change as the old makes way for the new. This will be a particularly poignant finale for those who have followed the series.
