And she did.

There’s never been a day when she hasn’t been there for me. Making fried bologna and teaching me about game shows. Brushing my tangles out in a way that doesn’t hurt. Asking me how I am and wanting the real answer. Rubbing my back while I’m sick and fighting with nurses to stay with me.

And now . . . looking into Grammy’s denim-blue eyes, I feel lucky that I never had to weather a storm alone—and that Grammy and Papa Joseph were there to step in when my mother stepped out.

My gaze moves across the faces of my neighbors—and I think how every one of them has helped me in some way this summer. And I realize what I’ve always known—that family isn’t really about blood and having the same last name. It’s made by the people who love you. Who worry about you and champion you. Who take one look at you and know when you need a talk over that nourishing tea.

I feel silly for having shouted at the rain, complaining about living under a cloud. Thing is, the sun is always in the sky—it just gets hidden sometimes.

I hear Grammy and Esme and Henry laughing and something deep inside starts small but gets bigger and bigger . . . a feeling.

How lucky I’ve been.

I have never been abandoned.

I have been loved every day of my life.

Dear Readers,

“It’s not what you look at that counts, but what you see.”

This is an important facet of Shouting at the Rain—this idea that people can look at the same situation and see different things.

I struggled as a kid. In middle school, I looked at my life and felt that, perhaps, I was unlucky. Just like in the book, we shopped at tag sales, had a car that required prayer before starting, lived with walls that were coated in soot from the furnace, had friends who were loyal one day but not the next, and I had parents who could not be available to me.

But in high school, it stunned me when a friend commented on how lucky I was. Seeing my life through her eyes did make my perception tip a bit. And upon further study I discovered that you find what you look for. After looking a little more closely, I realized I did, indeed, have many blessings. Moving forward, I decided to shine a light upon my blessings rather than my struggles.

In Shouting at the Rain, I wanted to find a fun way to show how we can all look at the same thing and see different things, and so I created anagrams throughout. An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging all the letters from another word or phrase. (For example, the word listen is an anagram of the word silent—they have the same letters placed in different orders.)

So each speaking character’s name is an anagram that is a hint about the character’s personality, life, secret, or a trait they have.