“You understand this is not about your father and me getting back together,” she tells Dalton and his sister, but for kids of divorce, hope springs eternal. Anyway, when the marriage went south, his dad went north.

“He won’t make you do that,” Dalton tells her, but she doesn’t seem too sure.Ī few years back, Dalton’s mom had left him for a loser with nice pecs and a soul patch, who she subsequently kicked to the curb a year later. “If your dad won’t put me up, I’ll be happy to stay in a hotel,” she says. Today, however, it’s not just the two of them traveling north. “They oughta call it John Glenn instead of John Wayne,” Dalton once said-because taking off from there was the closest most people would ever get to blasting off into space.ĭalton and his younger sister are regular flyers, visiting their dad, who lives up in Portland, a few times a year-Christmas, Easter, most of the summer, and every other Thanksgiving. The plane then coasts out over the back bay, Balboa Island, and the Newport Peninsula before the pilot pushes the engines back to full and resumes the climb-out. Basically, the plane powers up on the runway with its brakes on, then accelerates at full force into a ridiculously steep takeoff, followed ten seconds later by a sudden leveling off and throttling down of the engines, which sounds, to the uninitiated, like engine failure, causing at least one person on every flight to gasp, or even scream in panic. They call it a “modified noise abatement takeoff,” and it was specifically implemented to spare Newport Beach millionaires from having to deal with airport noise. Excerptĭalton loves the way planes take off from John Wayne Airport. And when her parents don’t return and her life-and the life of her brother-is threatened, Alyssa has to make impossible choices if she’s going to survive. Suddenly, Alyssa’s quiet suburban street spirals into a warzone of desperation neighbors and families turned against each other on the hunt for water.

Everyone’s lives have become an endless list of don’ts: don’t water the lawn, don’t fill up your pool, don’t take long showers. The drought-or the Tap-Out, as everyone calls it-has been going on for a while now.

When the California drought escalates to catastrophic proportions, one teen is forced to make life and death decisions for her family in this harrowing story of survival from New York Times bestselling author Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman. “No one does doom like Neal Shusterman.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “The Shustermans challenge readers.” - School Library Journal (starred review) “The palpable desperation that pervades the plot…feels true, giving it a chilling air of inevitability.” - Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The authors do not hold back.” - Booklist (starred review)

Dry by Neal Shusterman