Book Review: It’s Raining Men
It’s Raining Men, Hollie Smurthwaite, self-published, 2025, trade paperback and e-book, 323 pages.
Reviewed by Kelly Fumiko Weiss.
It’s Raining Men is a fantasy romance novel written by Hollie Smurthwaite. It is the start of a new book series, The Greatest Hits of Greater Wick, following her successful The Psychic Colors trilogy. It’s Raining Men follows Sahara as she stumbles into a magical enclave that has been created for one purpose—to give a group of witches their perfect sexual partner. Unbeknownst to Sahara, by chasing her dog through a bramble, cutting herself on trees and bushes along the way, and entering this magically spelled location, her inadvertent blood donation “steals” one of these perfect mates from the witches that conjured the spell and creates the ideal mate for her instead.
This perfect-for-her man, Cortland, isn’t what she expected she’d want. And she refuses to sleep with him because she believes he should have a choice and not be magically compelled into doing anything he wouldn’t normally want to do. This tension between “he’s made for her,” and “he’s being forced to do this,” makes for an interesting moral dilemma that drives the emotional narrative. The rest of the story is wild and fantastic and is driven by the witch that was deprived of her perfect partner searching for Sahara to get her promised magic man back, and Sahara and her newfound friends desperately trying to keep her hidden trying to find a way to break the spell and let the men be free.
It would be easy to laugh at the premise of this book, but Smurthwaite is an excellent writer, and she grounds the story with enough heart and soul in Sahara that it’s very easy to read and fall in love with this world and its characters. The other perfect mate men that she meets along the way are both over-the-top and completely plausible, and make readers wonder who their perfect sexual partner would actually be.
It’s hard not to cringe at the thought of the gender roles in this story being reversed, which is another reason why this is such a good read. It turns many tropes on their heads and shows that no matter who the aggressor is, partnership should be a choice and not forced. Not to spoil anything, but the relationship between Sahara and Cortland grows throughout the book, and their love for each other at the end feels earned. You are rooting for it even more because Sahara took the moral high ground, and she and Cortland both had learning curves and redemptive arcs along the way.
I was honored to review The Color of Betrayal by Smurthwaite back in 2022, and I continue to be a true fan of her writing. She is an excellent world-builder and creates characters that feel fresh and, in the case of It’s Raining Men, incredibly playful and fun. I look forward to reading more of the Greater Hits of Greater Wick series and, as always, Smurthwaite is an author to admire.
