Only now do I see how dry his lips are. Not just dry but parched and chapped to the point of bleeding. None of these kids look right. Their skin is thin and almost leprous gray. The corners of their mouths are white with dried spit. And the look in their eyes is almost rabid.

It's unsettling how utterly convincing this book is. Maybe it works so well because the concept is so relevant and believable - a severe drought in Southern California is hardly fantastical - but it also has a lot to do with the way the Shusterman duo writes. 

In a style somewhat reminiscent of storytellers like Stephen King, the authors paint this dystopian picture slowly, gradually, introducing a fairly large cast of characters along the way. The horrors creep quietly into a world that very closely resembles our own, making them easy to believe in. What is first a subdued desire for water becomes a pressing need, which in turn becomes an obsessive frenzy.

You can tell a lot of thought has gone into how people would behave when their lives (or worse-- the lives of their families) become threatened by a lack of water. When the people in Dry become desperate, it’s amazing and terrible what can be seen as a source of water. And let me tell you: the authors and the characters in this book get VERY creative on that front.

Could we be so desperate for drinkable water that we're willing to destroy the very machines that could create it, just to get that first sip?

The way the characters are used to tell the story here might not suit everyone. The Shustermans bring in many different perspectives in order to capture all angles of the water craze rather than focusing on one or a few individuals. I can pinpoint the main characters as Alyssa, Kelton, Garrett and Jacqui (who is freaking awesome, by the way) but I would still say this is more a book about the bigger picture, which includes many people's perspectives across the course of the novel. The characters are left racially ambiguous, some described as "olive-skinned" but of indeterminate race.

It's a standalone and so a whole lot is covered in these 350 pages. We see how a survivalist family first thrives but then becomes a target; we see how kind neighbours become enemies; we see an entrepreneurial few try to capitalize on the new hot commodity; we see the ugliness that can quickly rear its head when people are desperate.

I thought it worked really well at creating a sense of desperation and paranoia. It made ME want to go stock up on emergency supplies (I swear I'm not even joking. I found myself on this page after reading it.) Very convincing and discomfiting.

Emily May

What an amazing book! I love the way Neal Shusterman always takes a what-if scenario and morphs it to freaky disaster proportions. In this case, he and co-author Jared Shusterman have got a not-too-improbable scenario where southern California is having a drought, and FEMA decides to prefer one disaster over another while leaving some citizens hung out to dry (gee, THAT hasn’t happened in recent history.) When the water in the taps gets shut off and suddenly all that’s left is what was in your house or on the store shelves the moment the taps ran dry, predictably, humankind turns into a pack of savages, or as Shusterman(s) call it—water zombies. 

And really, this DOES have the feel of a zombie book, in an absolutely cool way. There is almost no humanity in the behavior we see portrayed in sickening detail, from stores, to mobs, to price gougers, to opportunists, to predatory. It is sickening, and the sad thing is, while you want to curl your lip in disgust and swear these creatures are beneath you, that you would never do something like this, the flip side of this coin is how realistically the authors paint their desperation. Is it any easier to stand by and do nothing while you watch your loved ones die before your eyes? How many of us wouldn’t pick up spears and turn feral if it was the only way to survive? A truly great Shusterman book.

Kat