Dry by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman is a terrifyingly realistic book about the drought in California… taken to the extreme. When water stops running in an event called the “Tap-Out”, Alyssa, her younger brother, and their neighbor are plunged into a natural-disaster survival story as they fight to find her family. And water.

This book was absolutely fantastic. It reminded me of books I used to enjoy a lot in middle school, like Monument 14. Except this one felt much more realistic, which made it much scarier. The entire time I was reading, I was playing out “what-if” scenarios in my head (I definitely don’t survive the Tap-Out, btw). Neal and Jarrod Shusterman are also masters of suspense and action, building a tense, heart-racing adventure in which I genuinely feared for the main characters, multiple times. Everything went wrong, and everyone was dying, and it was absolutely spectacular.