I want to begin by telling you the things that I really enjoyed about this book.

When Lynn’s mother is killed in a terrible accident, Lynn is forced to leave her pond and venture into the unknown, and things get really complicated when a young girl named Lucy, her uncle Eli, and an old man named Stebbs invade Lynn’s orderly and controlled life. When they aren’t surveying their surroundings from the roof, rifles at the ready, they are painstakingly collecting and purifying the pond water, watching as the water level slowly recedes. Lynn’s entire life has been this way so she’s grown up learning how to shoot and kill anything that comes near the pond, including people. Lynn and her mother live in the basement of a ramshackle house beside a pond, defending their only water source with their very lives. And unfortunately, through no fault of the book, it came right on the heels of two of the best books I’ve read so far this year ( Vicious and Kinslayer). What could have been an excellent tale of survival and tenacity of the human spirit, instead left me with many unanswered questions, and I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough to completely enjoy it.

While Not a Drop to Drink is beautifully written, and the relationships between the characters are well developed, I found so many holes and undeveloped ideas in the story that it tainted my overall reaction to the book. But I was so taken with the cover that I expected the story within to speak to me just as strongly, and unfortunately it didn’t. It is still one of my favorites this year and evokes a feeling of desolation and dread, and I was thrilled when I was approved on Edelweiss to read it. When the cover was first revealed for Not a Drop to Drink, I was ecstatic. Lynn fit into it nicely, and watched over Lucy while she slept. Mother’s smell was there, the outline of her body still imprinted on the mattress. Stebbs had unknowingly put Lucy in Lynn’s own bed, and so she laid down in Mother’s cot, surprised at the waft of scent that enveloped her as she slid under the blankets. In a word: Beautifully descriptive writing, a feisty but unemotional heroine, some tense moments that made my heart beat faster, but ultimately weak world-building that made the story less enjoyable.

Not a drop to drink book