On Miss Bates’s fridge, amidst myriad souvenir magnets, adheres a favourite, the image of a red-clad elephant on a silver background.  It is Ganesha, the Hindu deity, who dispells “impediments” and is the lover of wisdom and learning.  Miss Bates often looks at it as she ponders the curbs and checks that plague a life.  Thus it is with the hero and heroine of Rula Sinara’s début romance, The Promise Of Rain.  There are obstacles to their HEA; self-imposed barriers are the worst of them.  They are soul-blocked, not so much from loving, but allowing another to love them.  Our Jackson and Anna are super-smart at what they do, well-educated and competent in so many ways, but utterly foolish about, and closed-off to, love.  In this romance, there is all that and: wonderful, sentient beings, the elephants, the beauty of Kenya, engaging writing, a believable moppet, and fleshed-out secondary characters.  Miss Bates was deeply moved by Sinara’s romance, by her emotionally fragile, lonely protagonists and their journey to “a marriage of true minds,” with some help along the way by “removers,” human and animal, of obstacles.  This début is impressive, indeed. Continue reading