Drought by Pam Bachorz

Drought, by Pam Bachorz, is another YA book I found on our Scholastic Bookfair. Wow. It is complicated and sort of hard to explain. There is a Christ-like figure, Otto, around whom a cult (the Congregation) started and lives. Before he left them, Owen married and had a daughter, Ruby. His blood (a few drops in the drinking water supply) gave the Congregation prolonged life. Since he left, they were enslaved by Darwin West--that happened 200 years ago. West forces them to collect water from the forest, because he believes that is what brings the prolonged life. What he and most of the congregation do not know is that now Ruby's blood is what prolongs their lives.

This book seems dystopic because of the power struggle, but the Congregation is living a secret life and ordinary American life seems to exist away from the forest. It qualifies as fantasy.

Thankfully, the publisher provided an annotation, see below.

http://www.pambachorz.com/ You can listen to the first chapter. Whoo-whee this book is shaping up to get banned! I, of course, enjoyed it immensely.

From the author's website: Ruby dreams of escaping the Congregation. Escape from slaver Darwin West and his cruel Overseers. Escape from the backbreaking work of gathering Water. Escape from living as if it is still 1812, the year they were all enslaved.

When Ruby meets Ford--an irresistible, kind, forbidden new Overseer--she longs to run away with him to the modern world, where she could live a normal teenage live. Escape with Ford would be so simple.

But if Ruby leaves, her community is condemned to certain death. She, alone, possess the secret ingredient that makes the Water so special--her blood--and it's the one thing that the Congregation cannot live without.

Drought is the haunting story of one community’s thirst for life, and the dangerous struggle of the only girl who can grant it.

Ruby Prosser longs for escape from the Congregation and the early-nineteenth-century lifestyle the community practices, even though she knows the Congregants need her blood to survive, but when she meets Ford, the new Overseer, who holds the promise to access to the modern world, her will to stay weakens.