Eliza and her parents, displaced after flooding in Houston during Hurricane Harvey, are staying with her aunt’s family as Eliza starts the 2017 school year. Since her high school was also flooded, she and other Baldwin students—mostly white upper-middle class kids like Eliza—are attending Southwest High, in a working class neighborhood with majority Black and brown students. Southwest student Javier’s house wasn’t damaged in the storm, but since the hurricane he’s been having severe panic attacks every time it rains. A story alternating between Eliza’s and Javi’s points of view balances their slowly developing romance with their activism when they become co-presidents of an environmental club. With the help of the school counselor, Mexican American Javi learns coping techniques to manage his situational stress. He also begins researching the disproportionate impact of climate change on poor communities, especially communities of color globally. He’s hoping to do a presentation for the club on climate anxiety and eco-justice, but Eliza, laser focused on meeting different goals and unwilling to engage with the emotional impact of everything she’s gone through, brushes the idea off on a day when nothing seems to be going right, and each thing going wrong has a snowball effect. This exploration of mental health related to climate anxiety is wonderfully grounded in its two main characters and the context of their lives, including the fact that each of their families have significant, if vastly different, economic connections to the Houston oil industry. (Age 13 and older)

From Jennifer Mathieu, the acclaimed author of Moxie - now a Netflix film - and Bad Girls Never Say Die, comes a bold novel about two young activists who find love and themselves as they tackle the threat of climate change.

After Eliza’s home in Houston is destroyed by Hurricane Harvey, she is forced to transfer to Southwest High School. Traumatized by the floods and anxious in her new surroundings, Eliza throws herself into environmental activism, even if it's against the wishes of her Big Oil dad.

But when she meets Javi – a boy who has experienced climate-related trauma of his own – she's finally able to connect with someone over the devastating mental effects of ecological disaster.

Filled with nuanced themes of mental health, classism, and eco-anxiety, Down Came the Rain is a riveting and moving tale of friendship, first love, and what it means to grow up in an ever-changing world.