Mindy McGinnis

Not a Drop to Drink

Monicap

I feel cheated by that ending. Because seriously? Closure? I’m having a lack of it.

Throughout the entire book, the pacing felt awkward. The beginning was slow, and then (view spoiler)[her Mom died and (hide spoiler)]it picked up. (view spoiler)[We met Eli and Neva and Lucy (hide spoiler)] and then it slowed down again. There was gigantic lull that was winter wherein nothing happened (view spoiler)[other than Eli and Lynn kissing, and Lucy getting sick (hide spoiler)] and then towards the end, a lot of shit happened really quick and it felt really rushed and awkward. 

Also, the plot just seemed to be a series of unconnected events. Which is fine… for real life. In a book, everything should be connected to something else and have a reason and be stemming from a prior event and… it just, it didn’t feel like there was one, unbroken thread of a plot connecting the beginning to the end.

Another thing—the world could have borne some more explaining. I mean, I understand what’s happening in the world. There’s a water shortage. What I don’t understand is how it got that way. Mother Nature has a very good system in place to make sure that we never run out of fresh water. The only things that I can imagine that would have messed with the water cycle also leave all humans dead. 

I LOVED the main character, Lynn, and Stebbs. And the most charming moment in the book, I feel, was when they the sex talk. That was so delightfully awkward. 

Other characters: Mother, Neva, Lucy, Eli.

I liked Lucy because she was cute. Mother seemed to serve a purpose, but she was a little boring. And I don’t feel like I really got to know Neva or Eli well enough (view spoiler)[to give much of a shit when they died (hide spoiler)]

And there it is: I didn’t know the characters well enough, so when the end happened… I felt cheated. 

Not a bad read, but not the best. I will go for the next one, see if it can manage those hanging threads of plot and character and resolve my feeling of being cheated. (I’m not sure how it could, but it’s been done before. Second books wrapping up impossible endings, that is.) 

I want to give this book four stars, but based on all that I said, it doesn’t look like it deserves it.

FINAL VERDICT:
I give this book a 3.5, but I feel like it’s a four star book.

Maggie Gordon

Cross-posted at: http://mgbookreviews.wordpress.com/20... 

Synopsis

Lynn’s entire life has been focused on protecting her pond no matter what the cost. After all, people can live without a lot of things, but water is essential to staying alive, and there isn’t a lot of this precious resource left. For years, Lynn and her mother have dedicated their life to survival, rejecting almost all other human contact. However, when Lynn’s mother dies in a terrible accident, Lynn faces a choice between trying to survive on her own or finally letting down her barriers and accepting help from others. But who can she trust when all she has ever known is fear and isolation?

The Good

The best part of Not a Drop to Drink is Lynn, the protagonist. Looking at my blog, it’s probably readily apparent that I favour books with interesting and strong female leads, and Lynn fits this bill exceptionally well. She’s been raised in the sole company of her mother, in a world where the two of them have to kill or be killed. Consequently, she’s an angry, withdrawn, and socially inept individual who can’t think of others as anything other than enemies. She’s not a soft character, and most of the “feminine” traits of nurturing that are so prevalent in female leads are all but completely absent in her at the beginning. The book is the story of her growth into a better, more balanced human being, and this process does not come easy to her. She can’t comprehend the idea of helping someone for the sake of compassion, and everything in her world has a cost. She’s a product of her environment, and she acted as one should in this type of scenario. I really appreciated seeing a female protagonist portrayed with these types of character flaws that made so much sense in her world, and that she was never turned into a “typical” girl character, even as she began to open up more.

The other strength of Not a Drop to Drink is the chilling atmosphere. This is a dystopia/post-apocalyptic tale with some actual teeth, and McGinnis conveys the constant and never-ending fear of the situation very well. The characters clearly know that their survival depends on the small patch of water on their land as they’ve witnessed many people slowly die from dehydration. Lynn first kills someone when she is nine years old in order to ensure that the pond remains safe. Many recent dystopias/post-apocalyptic books have explored starvation as a theme, but this was one of the few books that I have seen that really pushed readers to consider what would happen if water was such an incredibly limited resource. It’s a scary reality, and it makes the world of the characters very claustrophobic.

The Bad

One of my more minor critiques about the book is the romance. While I give the author mad props for writing the romance as a subplot to the overall story, I didn’t believe that it needed to be a subplot at all. Lynn is a damaged character. She’s spent her entire life with just her mother by her side, and she’s learned that other people are dangerous and liable to harm her. Her only experience with men comes from her mother’s not so forgiving descriptions of them and from her occasional interactions with her grown neighbour. Consequently, even though I can see that Lynn is starved for human affection, I don’t really buy that she’d be so quick to let Eli into her life as a love interest. Fortunately, the love story portions of this book are brief, but their implausibility drew me out of the story every time one of these scenes came up.

My other two critiques about Not a Drop to Drink are more substantial. The first concerns the lack of world-building. At the start of the book, you know that water is an extremely rare and precious resource, but you don’t find out about why until much later in the book. When the author does get around to telling her readers about what happened to make the world like this, the information is still pretty sparse. What we do learn is that there are big cities where most of the people left on Earth live, and where water is controlled by those in power. We also find out that the city military knows of all the available water sources nearby, including Lynn’s pond. I found it quite questionable that a dystopian government would be comfortable letting a source of water remain uncontrolled so close to their territory when it was protected by only two women for almost two decades. Maybe this could be explained by some additional world-building that showed how the city government wasn’t going to waste resources trying to subdue and control the rural territories, but I felt like there should have been something added to the book to explain why the city was quite content to let these scattered water resources remain in the hands of people who would normally be seen as rebels in a dystopic world.

Attached to this problem is the fact that Lynn’s mother was portrayed as a very paranoid woman who was overly suspicious and callous. Lynn spends the book learning how to appreciate her mother’s lessons without being such a misanthrope. However, thinking about the context of the book, perhaps Lynn’s mother was more right than the story gave her credit for. At the end of Not a Drop to Drink, Lynn starts to create a community with other non-city folk, but wasn’t isolation the exact thing that may have been keeping her safe? As small units of one or two people, none of the rural folk would have been seen as a threat to the cities as they simply didn’t have enough power on their own. The city knew they had water, but isolated, the rural people wouldn’t be able to muster up any sort of resistance, or offer shelter to dissidents from the cities. By creating their own community, the rural people represented a possibility of change that would have been extremely dangerous to any group maintaining political power in the city.

Admittedly, McGinnis was obviously more interested in writing a story about Lynn and the few people that she interacted with rather than a big exploration of the Earth in a water-scarce state. This is a completely valid choice, and one that I enjoyed quite a bit. However, authors shouldn’t neglect to fully question the implications of their world just because they want a story with a smaller scale. These were pretty obvious world-building issues, and the book would have been stronger had McGinnis thought them out more.

My last critique involves the ending of the book. All throughout the novel, I pegged Not a Drop to Drink as a four-star story because of the strengths of its atmosphere and characters, but the last few chapters were incredibly jarring to me. An ongoing thread throughout the book is the fact that Lynn knows that there are new people set up near another area with water, and these people have tried to attack her. As the danger increases, Lynn and her small crew decide that they must attack this settlement, leading to an extremely quick climax to the book. I found the battle to be at odds with the rest of the story’s themes and focus, and it was particularly strange and unexpected that the big bad turned out to be Lynn’s dad. This plot point did not do much for her development, and it felt like an unneeded attempt to ratchet up the suspense. During the battle, a main character was killed, but we didn’t have time to grieve since the ending was a time skip. We find out that Lynn is part of a bigger community of people living outside of the city, having finally learned to appreciate the company and strengths of others. However, as I mentioned above, not only was this possibly not a good ending when considering the world information that we were given, it also felt very sudden and unearned. Lynn was still working on being a mildly tolerable human being before the attack on the settlement, and I would have liked to see her reactions to happened during the climax. Not to say that I don’t appreciate that Not a Drop to Drink was not another sprawling trilogy, but I think that the author could have given readers a bit more of a denouement centered on character development.

Final Comments

Not a Drop to Drink was a fantastic book up until the last few chapters. Even so, it wasn’t that the plot or the writing was horrible, but just that I thought that the author could have done so much better with the story that she had crafted. However, despite my critiques, I am still quite ready to recommend this book as a great example of what YA dystopia/post-apocalyptic literature can be. Lynn is a suburb female lead who challenges gender stereotypes, and while the story is small in scope, its heart and lessons are poignant and fulfilling.

Ella Zegarra

I've received an ARC of this in exchange of a honest review

Publicado Originalmente: El Extraño Gato del Cuento

Libro debut de Mindy McGinnis y ¡qué buena forma de iniciar carrera! Con un título que te hace pensar inmediatamente en el género, Not a Drop to Drink (Ni una Gota para Beber, sería algo así en español) te envuelve desde el principio.

No tenemos la típica distopía donde la heroína se da con la sorpresa que es la llave o un gran medio para salvar al mundo. No tenemos super armas, un mega complot mundial, o alguno "clásico" para saber que el libro es bueno. Me gusta porque el libro es sumamente creíble, cogiendo uno de los temas más importante de la sociedad actual "La pronta falta de agua y sus consecuencias", haciéndote no solo meterte en la historia como si tú fueras Lynn, sino también, parar de leer y pensar en lo qué tú en realidad harías en esa situación.

Lynn y su Madre son personas normales quienes intentan sobrevivir lo mejor que pueden a este nuevo escenario que les toco vivir. Y es por eso que este libro es tan especial, puedes verte claramente en la historia sin siquiera intentarlo.

Definitivamente la Madre de Lynn pasará a ser uno de esos personajes memorables. Su fuerza, su determinación y el gran amor por su hija, a veces demostrado de una manera extraña la hacen un personaje completo. Digno de admirar. Lynn. Es difícil explicar lo rico de su desarrollo en libro sin caer en spoilers. La vemos pasar por muchas etapas en un corta periodo de tiempo, del dolor más agudo a la decisión más difícil. Salir de esa inocencia y desconfianza por aislamiento para convertirse en alguien maduro y más abierto, sin olvidar quién es.

¿Algo "malo"? Que es solo un libro, soy gran fan de las sagas, y la historia que Mindy nos trae aún tiene mucho que contar. Quiero pensar en este libro como una precuela o un spin-off, es algo que no puedo sacarme de la cabeza. El libro es genial, tiene lo justo de todo, muchos personajes memorables los cuales no les menciono para que lean el libro, decisiones que rompen el corazón y una historia muy realista. En resumen: LÉANLO.

Reseña Completa: El Extraño Gato del Cuento

Fans of classic frontier survival stories, as well as readers of dystopian literature, will enjoy this futuristic story where water is worth more than gold. New York Times bestselling author Michael Grant says Not a Drop to Drink is a debut "not to be missed." With evocative, spare language and incredible drama, danger, and romance, Mindy McGinnis depicts one girl's journey in a frontierlike world not so different from our own. Teenage Lynn has been taught to defend her pond against every threat: drought, a snowless winter, coyotes, and most important, people looking for a drink. She makes sure anyone who comes near the pond leaves thirsty—or doesn't leave at all. Confident in her own abilities, Lynn has no use for the world beyond the nearby fields and forest. But when strangers appear, the mysterious footprints by the pond, nighttime threats, and gunshots make it all too clear Lynn has exactly what they want, and they won't stop until they get it. . . . For more in this gritty world, join Lynn on an epic journey to find home in the companion novel, In a Handful of Dust.

Not a Drop to Drink

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