28 pp. September 1, 2025, Storytime Publishing. Short fiction.
Something of the feel, atmosphere, tenor of this story stayed with me for many days after I read it; I feel it even now, writing about it.
The Smell of Rain is set in a near future, drought-ravaged Cape—so dry that signs of rain can be depended upon to be false, a cruel mockery. It opens with exhausted Tilda checking her water collection tanks to make sure they’re not blocked—just in case, you know, because what if it does rain? She later spots a movement through her window—terrifying anyway when a woman lives alone, but far more so in these desperate times. What follows is a short but wonderfully executed account of survival and the assault of memory.
A brilliant story from Young, so succinct and precise in her delivery of this tale of women’s lives during a fairly inevitable near-future apocalypse. It’s intriguing how real it reads already when the Cape is so prone to climate crisis-related disasters—droughts, and fires. What carries the story for me is the spareness of the prose and how Young describes the environment, how sere the land around Tilda feels, how heavy the sky. If I felt a touch of reserve when I met the main characters—if I worried about tension from the setting, knowing about South Africa’s race relations (Tilda is apparently white, and other characters “brown”)—this is not, thank goodness, that story. This is about women, cooperation, and survival.
A wonderful tale that I wholeheartedly and highly recommend. Thanks to Storytime and Ivor Hartmann for DRC access.
Harare Review of Books 
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