Dry

Neal Shusterman was born in Brooklyn, New York, and spent much of his childhood reading. His parents moved the family to Mexico City when he was 16, which he today credits with giving him a new perspective on life and confidence he couldn’t have gotten anywhere else. He graduated from the American School Foundation in Mexico City and then earned bachelor’s degrees in psychology and theater. Shusterman worked briefly for a Los Angeles-based talent agency after college and within a year of his hire, he’d landed his first book deal and began writing screenplays. Many of his books, most notably his 2015 novel Challenger Deep, have received honors and awards, and several are being adapted for film. He lives in southern California. His second son, Jarrod, has collaborated with him on several novels and novellas, including Dry and Roxy. Jarrod and his partner have also co-written books together, and they have also written for film and television.

The Colorado River runs from the Rocky Mountains in northern Colorado to the Gulf of California, supplying about 40 million people with drinking water, electricity, and irrigation for agriculture. Because of this, the Southern Nevada Water Authority  has called it one of “the most controlled, controversial and litigated rivers in the world.” By 1973, what’s known as the Law of the River was in place. The Law of the River is actually a group of laws, compacts, and federal acts that governs which states (and Mexico) get water from the river, and how much. However, even by the mid-20th century, planners were worried that states’ water needs would quickly surpass what the river could supply. And in the early 2000s, studies of tree rings revealed that the flow rate figures used to initially allocate water were based on only a couple decades’ worth of data—and those decades were some of the wettest in centuries. Additionally, since 2000, the southwestern United States has experienced a megadrought—the dryest period in the area since the year 800. The megadrought is caused by climate change, particularly warming temperatures, which leads to increased evaporation from rivers, canals, lakes, and reservoirs. The increasing temperatures and dry conditions, especially in California, have also led to an increase in forest fire frequency—and an increase in their intensity. For instance, the 2018 Camp Fire killed 85 people, displaced over 50,000, and burned 153,336 acres over 18 days. While various efforts to slow climate change have been proposed and implemented, the planet is expected to continue to warm—creating conditions even more favorable to droughts, wildfires, and other natural disasters from hurricanes to tornadoes.

Dry is one of many novels, young adult and otherwise, that considers what might happen in the wake of an extreme natural disaster. The graphic novel Odessa by Jonathan Hill is set eight years after a massive earthquake destroys the western half of the United States, while Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer imagines that a meteor has knocked Earth closer to the moon. The adult novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, meanwhile, is set several years after a deadly pandemic wipes out most humans, detailing how those who survive attempt to rebuild. Neal Shusterman is perhaps better known for his series with more sci-fi and fantasy elements, including Scythe and Unwind. In addition to collaborating with Neal on several novellas for both of those series, Jarrod and Neal have also cowritten Roxy (which is about the opioid epidemic) and he cowrote Retro with his partner, Sofía Lapuente. Within the novel itself, Alyssa is writing a paper on the classic novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Lord of the Flies follows a group of boys attempting to survive when they’re stranded on an island, and it’s one of many novels that explores human nature. C.S. Lewis considers the subject in many of his books, including Out of the Silent Planet, while Suzanne Collins’s The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes—like Dry—considers both human nature and media’s role in covering humanitarian crises (though in Ballad, the crisis is contrived by the government). Henry, meanwhile, is interested in books like Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power, which purport to share the skills people need to be most effective in life in general and in negotiations specifically.