Helen Sarah Fields

Fifty Words for Rain is Asha Lemmie's novel about a mixed-race girl hidden away in a Kyoto household after the war. What sits on this page is somebody else's compressed retelling of it, sold without Lemmie's involvement and returning her nothing. Compressing fiction is a stranger business than compressing a management book, because a plot outline strips out the only thing anybody opens a novel for. Whoever assembled it has no other work to look up; the name exists to put something on a cover. The same arrangement turns up elsewhere here under two more invented names.