This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The Rainseekers will be released on February 17, 2026.
After having a wonderful time reading the short story “The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye,” I’ve been curious to try the longer-form work of Matthew Kressel. When I saw that The Rainseekers would be out this winter—not an especially long novella, but certainly longer than a short story—it was the perfect opportunity to dip a toe.
The Rainseekers follows a small group of adventurers hoping to be the first witnesses to rain on Mars. Prolonged terraforming efforts have made the planet increasingly livable and have given rise to regular snowfall. But rain has remained a rarity, and to find it, the characters must journey to a wilderness that had never seen human footprints and hope that the long-range forecasting would come good. Along the way, an influencer-turned-journalist collects the stories of her fellows, digging into the myriad tales of what brought this disparate group to the far reaches of the red planet.
The novella includes a surprising number of chapters—24 in total—but they vary significantly in length. There are a handful of long chapters, usually written in first person, that detail a traveler’s story in their own words. In between are short interludes about the progress of the expedition and the lead’s continued attempts to find more compatriots to interview. Toward the end, the exploration chapters begin to dominate, but on the whole, this is a story made up of disparate character arcs stitched together.
I’m not a particular fan of mosaic novels, but as long as there’s enough connective tissue to give a sense of cohesion and the individual character stories are compelling enough, I’ve been known to quite enjoy a few tales that focus more on the travails of the various characters than on the broader plot arc. And here, there is absolutely enough cohesion for the format to work. There may not be world-shaking stakes to the plot, but the adventure clearly matters to the characters, and the inevitable difficulties in a harsh environment so far from civilization add genuine questions of life and death. Furthermore, there’s a common through line amongst the individual stories that clearly build to a bigger thematic point that the novella seeks to convey.
But the commonalities are somewhat of a double-edged sword. Yes, it lends thematic cohesion, but it also makes the individual stories feel too similar. Despite featuring characters of different genders, ethnicities, religions, etc., so many of them follow broadly similar arcs. They start out dealing with more-or-less ordinary struggles in coming-of-age before inevitably falling into destructive habits that leave them in pieces, unrecognizable from the ways they’d like to see themselves. And then, somehow, an opportunity arises to build something new, and that opportunity brings them to Mars.
It’s not a bad story structure, and it works to establish a theme of perseverance and striving in the darkest of times that tends to stay relevant across eras and certainly lands in our own. But having so many similar stories in such a short novella makes them feel predictable in a way that robs the individual tales of some necessary tension. There are some supremely talented wordsmiths who can immerse a reader in a series of similar tales, but it’s a difficult task, and The Rainseekers doesn’t manage it. The flashbacks individually are solid writing. But taking them as a unit hurts as much as it helps.
On the whole, The Rainseekers advances a compelling theme and delivers some genuine tension in the main plot arc, featuring adventurers trying to survive a harsh landscape with rapidly dwindling resources. But the flashbacks hit too many similar notes, making it hard for any one to really stick with the reader.
Can I use it for Bingo? Wait until April and it will inevitably fit Published in 2026.
Overall rating: 12 of Tar Vol’s 20. Three stars on Goodreads.