Nothing but the Rain is a fantastic debut novella. Salman weaves a complex narrative in which the narrator is unreliable because her memory and the world itself are unreliable. The shifts in narration, especially the final shift show the progression of the narration from scattered journal keeping; to intentional, beat by beat record keeping; to an attempt to piece together lost memories; and finally to intentional, confessional reflection from an unidentified point in the future, creating a rich linguistic landscape for readers to explore.
I enjoy the continued mystery surrounding the origin of the water's contamination as the root of the town's isolation and confusion. In the author providing a valid and heartbreaking reason for the narrator's resistance to socializing, her character is given an empathetic depth of humanity in a very short amount of page space.
The final paragraph, solidifying the identity of who the narrator is writing to in the last section of the book while explaining the narrator's last act of necessary violence is so good!
The landscape and dangers are richly defined, offering strong visuals with concise and easily readable language.