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January 31, 2014
It’s not too far into the future and the world’s fresh water supplies are extremely scarce. A young girl named Lynn lives with her mother in a country farmhouse. Their whole existence is based around protecting their one precious, life-giving possession. A pond. Life is hard for these women and they always have their rifles at the ready. Survival is the only goal.
“Not A Drop To Drink” is gritty and realistic. If you’ve read “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, you can expect a similar edge in this book where seemingly everything’s a potential dangerous threat. But this one is not nearly as extreme as “The Road” and might be appropriate for a younger but mature reader of YA books.
This book has a lot of detail about survival. Canning food, boiling and storing water, hunting, various ways to preserve meat, etc. Some of this stuff makes the story drag a bit but for the most part, the details are interesting. All the descriptive survival chapters do mean there is very little action, which somewhat surprised me. The story does have excellent character development though, as the main girl Lynn learns to rely on friends and realizes that even when everyone is just trying to survive on their own, community is still important.
I’d been following Mindy McGinnis’s blog and twitter account for a while before I read this book, which is her debut novel. She appears to live in the country somewhere in the Eastern U.S. Some of her thoughts and tweets are pretty rough and raw. She’s no "girlie girl" and can apparently handle herself in the outdoors. This leads me to believe that she could be this girl in “Not A Drop To Drink” or the girl’s Mama. So there’s a lot of heart and commitment in her writing and you can really believe her words and the survival techniques she describes.
All in all, it’s a nice, quick, well-written survival novel. Don’t expect much heart-stopping action, except for the last few chapters. And be warned, there’s no Hollywood ending, but you kind of guess that as you go along. Do look forward to likable characters and a story that the author could seemingly live out herself, both of which give “Not A Drop To Drink” an admirable level of accuracy and honesty.
**There is some swearing (asshole and son-of-a-bitch). A romance builds between Lynn and a boy named Eli but it’s all very sweet and innocent with only a small amount of kissing. However, towards the end, the topics of rape and brutality towards women are somewhat surprisingly introduced. It all happens “off camera” so to speak, but there’s no mistaking what’s going on. And the ending action has a lot of killing and gun play. This is one that parents should read first to make sure they are OK with their kids reading it and/or so they are able to discuss the book with their kids.**
“Not A Drop To Drink” is gritty and realistic. If you’ve read “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, you can expect a similar edge in this book where seemingly everything’s a potential dangerous threat. But this one is not nearly as extreme as “The Road” and might be appropriate for a younger but mature reader of YA books.
This book has a lot of detail about survival. Canning food, boiling and storing water, hunting, various ways to preserve meat, etc. Some of this stuff makes the story drag a bit but for the most part, the details are interesting. All the descriptive survival chapters do mean there is very little action, which somewhat surprised me. The story does have excellent character development though, as the main girl Lynn learns to rely on friends and realizes that even when everyone is just trying to survive on their own, community is still important.
I’d been following Mindy McGinnis’s blog and twitter account for a while before I read this book, which is her debut novel. She appears to live in the country somewhere in the Eastern U.S. Some of her thoughts and tweets are pretty rough and raw. She’s no "girlie girl" and can apparently handle herself in the outdoors. This leads me to believe that she could be this girl in “Not A Drop To Drink” or the girl’s Mama. So there’s a lot of heart and commitment in her writing and you can really believe her words and the survival techniques she describes.
All in all, it’s a nice, quick, well-written survival novel. Don’t expect much heart-stopping action, except for the last few chapters. And be warned, there’s no Hollywood ending, but you kind of guess that as you go along. Do look forward to likable characters and a story that the author could seemingly live out herself, both of which give “Not A Drop To Drink” an admirable level of accuracy and honesty.
**There is some swearing (asshole and son-of-a-bitch). A romance builds between Lynn and a boy named Eli but it’s all very sweet and innocent with only a small amount of kissing. However, towards the end, the topics of rape and brutality towards women are somewhat surprisingly introduced. It all happens “off camera” so to speak, but there’s no mistaking what’s going on. And the ending action has a lot of killing and gun play. This is one that parents should read first to make sure they are OK with their kids reading it and/or so they are able to discuss the book with their kids.**