That is, until their parents disappear, leaving them completely alone. When the Tap-Out hits and the state’s entire water supply runs dry, 16-year-old Alyssa Morrow and her little brother, Garrett, ration their Gatorade and try to be optimistic. When a calamitous drought overtakes southern California, a group of teens must struggle to keep their lives and their humanity in this father-son collaboration. Lovers of horror action fiction will feel right at home with this terrifyingly realistic story of our tenuous relationship with the environment and of the resilience of the human spirit in the face of desperate situations. None of it is presented simply, and none of it is sugarcoated.

The authors do not hold back-there is death, disease, manipulation, and chaos. Using multiple points of view, the authors fully flesh out Alyssa, Garrett, and their travel companions to showcase the various ways people mentally approach calamities. While this book leans on siege-like tropes established in zombie movies, the Shustermans revivify the genre by adding an environmental twist. Alyssa and Garrett must travel to find new sources of water, all the while defending themselves against people crazed by thirst. What ensues is a horrifyingly fast descent into barbarity as neighbor turns on neighbor, government intervention falls short, and society’s civil facade disintegrates. At first, people dismiss the news, but circumstances turn dire quickly when bottled water disappears off store shelves while the spigots remain dry. Alyssa and her brother, Garrett, are normal kids in a suburb in Southern California-that is, until surrounding states shut the floodgates to the Colorado River due to prolonged drought. Potentially Sensitive Areas: Mild language, Underage smoking, Violence, Guns, Sexual exploitation of minorsīooklist starred (August 2018 (Vol. And when her parents don’t return and her life-and the life of her brother-is threatened, Alyssa has to make impossible choices if she’s going to survive. Suddenly, Alyssa’s quiet suburban street spirals into a warzone of desperation neighbors and families turned against each other on the hunt for water. Everyone’s lives have become an endless list of don’ts: don’t water the lawn, don’t fill up your pool, don’t take long showers. The drought-or the Tap-Out, as everyone calls it-has been going on for a while now. When the California drought escalates to catastrophic proportions, one teen is forced to make life and death decisions for her family in this harrowing story of survival from New York Times bestselling author Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 390 p.

Books like dry by neal shusterman