Drought

Ruby dreams of escaping the Congregation. Escape from slaver Darwin West and his cruel Overseers. Escape from struggling to gather the life-prolonging Water that keeps the Congregants alive--and Darwin rich. Escape from her certain, dreary existence, living as if it's still the early 1800s, when the Congregation was first enslaved. But if Ruby leaves, the Congregation will die without the secret ingredient to the Water: her blood. So she stays, and prays to their savior Otto, who first gave Water to the Congregants... and fathered Ruby before he vanished.

When the Congregants discover Ruby's forbidden romance with an Overseer, they beat Ford to stop her from running away with him. Ruby steals their store of Water to save Ford's life and is banished. Ruby has everything she's dreamed of: a modern life with Ford. But the modern world isn't what she thought it would be, and Ruby can't forsake the Congregation. Love and loyalty push Ruby to return and fight for her family's freedom...at a terrible price.
from amazon.com

Beth says 2 Stars...

I wanted to like this one because it has such an interesting summary. However, I couldn't connect with the book. First, there was the plot that seemed to go nowhere. Yes there was conflict and the story moved forward, but it didn't seem to serve a purpose. In addition, I never connected enough with anything to actually care about what happened. The situation in the camp is disturbing, but doesn't make much sense. In order to understand the background it needed to be explained, which it wasn't. The book also feels like the start of a series, so perhaps Bachorz plans on using subsequent novels to build the world. I found the setting to be an intensely strange combination of current and old fashioned that just didn't work. The blend was too uneven to create a unified style and intensity to the book.

I must say, the characters were highly disappointing. Ruby didn't capture my attention or connect with me at all. I wanted to like her and feel her pain, but couldn't. Her willingness to accept things as they were and then disregard for almost everyone else did nothing to endear her to me. The other supporting characters were very flat and only occasionally had something interesting revealed about them. The main focus of the book was Ruby, and if the reader loved her it would be fantastic.

Overall this book was just really disappointing. I thought that it would be an interesting change of pace, and something that I hadn't read before. The concept is still fascinating, but somehow it managed to morph from cool to downright disturbing and creepy. I wouldn't recommend this one, but the cover is awesome.
Book from Publisher