Please-Don’t-Rain Suitcase is a fictional novel that tells the story of the hardships and adjustments that Blake Davis experiences when he becomes an orphan. The story highlights the emotions he feels when he loses everything in life that matters to him. He is forced to put the shattered pieces of his life together and move forward through his tears, grief, fears of the unknown, feelings of hopelessness and emptiness, and the loss of dreams.

In 1950, eight-year-old Blake Davis is thrown into foster care after his mother dies and his father is unable to care for him and his siblings. The Welfare Department intervenes, and the siblings are split up and scattered. Blake’s story highlights the good and bad experiences that he lives through in foster care and later in an orphanage.

Blake is placed in three different foster homes over a six-year period. He experiences both good and bad foster care. Blake is powerless and at the mercy of his caregivers. Not having a mother or father to intervene in his well-being leaves him vulnerable to abuse. The instability of foster care makes it impossible for Blake to put down roots.

At the age of fourteen, Blake is placed in an orphanage in Western North Carolina. The story follows Blake through his years in the orphanage and how the orphanage helps prepare him for life in the outside world. When he graduates from high school, the orphanage sends him out into the world with a Bible, a twenty-dollar bill, and a please-don’t-rain cardboard suitcase. All his belongings are packed into the one flimsy suitcase.

Blake’s story follows him into life outside the orphanage and focuses on how he copes and overcomes the circumstances of his shattered life in his search of love, happiness, and the place where he fits best in the world.

--K.L. Smith

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