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See, this is meant to be dystopian, and like yes, it is, a full-on massive water shortage has yet to occur in California, for now. I’m never been to the United States, so I can’t say what exactly what their water levels are like. However, living in Australia, and even just looking at the news, water shortages are becoming more and more common all around the world. I remember seeing images of people in Cape Town lining up with buckets to get water, or that even Sydney had to undergo water restrictions last year. Not to mention entire countries like India or many sub-Saharan countries are facing increased water shortages due to climate change bringing about more droughts and unpredictable rainfall. So, while it is technically dystopian, it also feels frighteningly real at the events that we will almost certainly face in the near future.

For the most part, I liked this book and after thinking over it, I have both positive and negative thoughts on it. The part I think it did the best on, was to really show this level of desperation and at how fast a so-called civilised society can descend into anarchy over something crucial to survival like water. I found it was able to really show how desperate people become and I suppose fall back onto out ‘animal�� instincts on doing nothing more than just survive, even if it means to beat back your friends and family to emerge on the top of the pack. Having these people who are dubbed water zombies by the main characters only adds to this and there are some pretty disgusting and disturbing things at what people will do to survive.

On the writing, it managed to be generally pretty tense and exciting, with pretty high stakes. However, there were some moments that pretty weird, especially where there was this one metaphor that went on for an entire paragraph on comparing women to deer and that you had to catch them or whatever, like ugh, no thanks. That was probably the main one, but there were some passages that I didn’t or couldn’t exactly vibe with and were pretty unnecessary and for me personally, sort of took away from the overall immersion of it.

The plot was fine, if not with some aspects being slightly predictable. There was quite a lot of shock value in some of the things that happened for sure. It’s essentially a happy ending for everyone, and I almost wanted for maybe a character death to have happened, as I feel it would end up being more meaningful to the reader as we read that lots of people died from the water crisis, but nobody that the reader is able to connect with in the novel, so it felt that the ending was slightly anticlimactic, as it was like, oh look, everyone’s fine. The ending was felt a bit rushed, as it was all wrapped up in just a few pages and maybe could have been prolonged slightly, even if just to see the effects the events of the novel had on the characters, as there is not much character development as everything does happen to quickly.

There were these random POV points that were meant to sure the situation of the crisis beyond the lens of the four primary POV characters. I didn’t love or hate that aspect, and I definitely got what the authors were going for here, as to show the reader what is happening elsewhere. However, I felt a lot of them really were not that meaningful and even though most of them were fairly interesting to read about, it didn’t really contribute much to the overall story.

The characters were ok. For me, they weren’t brilliant, but nor were they poorly written. I certainly would have liked a bit more depth and maybe more personality, but that’s being a bit picky, considering it is a YA novel. At least Kelton acknowledged himself that he’s a massive creep. The sort of romance that doesn’t really start until the very end felt sort of forced, especially with some of the events in the novel that led up to it and the things between the two characters.

So overall, I enjoyed it, though there were some things I had issues with. I haven’t read anything by Jarrod Shusterman, but I have read the Arc of a Scythe trilogy by Neal Shusterman, which I really enjoyed, and didn’t find Dry to be as good as that. 6.5/10