The Land of Little Rain is characterized as both "local color" and non-fiction, scientific writing.[3] It was written for an urban American audience unfamiliar with life in the Mojave desert. The book attempts to engage the reader by including direct, second person along with first and third person point of views. Common stereotypical images and ideas about the desert are presented and contrasted to the narrator's past experiences. Specific and intimate experiences with nature in the desert are reproduced in the present tense for the reader's benefit.
The language is elevated and formal but made more conversational with informal colloquial language and jargon of the Southwest. The long and involved sentences often link abstractions to concrete images and description of the desert. The descriptions are subjective and characterized by laudatory, critical, or satiric language. They are further colored by abundant use of metaphors, similes, and hyperbole.
The book is divided into fourteen chapters consisting of short stories and essays on nature. The progression from chapter to chapter is not readily apparent. The first four chapters outline the desert territory and follow the course of the streams and their associated wildlife. The next five chapters describe specific communities of people within the desert, all of which are connected tangentially by the water trails. The civilized and primitive communities are criticized or glorified, respectively. In the central chapter, "Jimville—A Bret Harte Town", local color fiction is mocked as a superficial and distorted representation of mining towns. The final chapters follow the course of the streams and their associated wildlife backwards into the mountains, whereas the last chapter ends in an unspecified and ideal community within the desert.
