This book was really engrossing. The only thing that kept me from devouring it in a few days was that it was too heavy and too real. I would get anxious and have to put it down for a while. Anyone who has read Cadillac Desert will recognize the near-future world of Bacigalupi as just about spot on to what Reisner foresaw in his book. For that reason I would say this is a must-read for anyone interested in the coming crisis of water in the American West and around the world. If you aren’t already terrified about that future you should probably read this book as well, because it will help you discover that visceral fea

As a work of fiction, this book is pretty good but not perfect, which is why I only give it four stars. The start is a bit slow, but like many thrillers it reaches a point about midway through where it just goes and you can’t stop turning pages. However, the writing falters every once in a while–characters do things that don’t quite make sense just to keep the narrative going, or they get a little too on the nose elucidating the author’s own perspective. For instance, several characters say things like “Cadillac Desert is such a great book, it really helps explain the situation we’re in”, at which point it really feels like the one-way mirror dissolves and I’m looking Paolo Bacigalupi right in the face.

At one point, two characters are running from a goon squad, having just met each other and ostensibly being mutually uninterested in each other’s fate but simply being forced to work together for survival, and then they have a multiple sentence dialogue without seeming even a little out of breath so that one character can explain how he happened to know the password to a secret door, a piece of information that had been foreshadowed earlier but proves completely irrelevant to any part of the plot going forward. This and other moments pulled me out of immersion and caused the whole book to read just a bit weaker than it could have been.

Overall, I would recommend this for fans of gritty, dystopian sci-fi as well as anyone interested in environmental issues. If neither of those describe you or if anxiety is not an emotion you would voluntarily subject yourself to, you can probably skip this one.