Thomas and Dustin work for the Office of Sustainability whose job it is to enforce these water and electricity restrictions. Paradoxically, the two brothers are drawn to a girl named Jerusha, who is a water bootlegger. When she asks Thomas to take a bath with her, it’s more of a forbidden temptation fulfilled than if she asked him to have sex with her.
Thomas and Dustin’s parents have been missing for the past year, and the brothers ultimately decide to travel from their native Oregon to California in search of some answers. Mr. Banks was a scientist consulting with the government on weather control. Accompanied by Jerusha, the boys travel by car through a blasted landscape until they come across a community whose members live in defiance of the restrictions. When the place is raided, Thomas, Jeruhsa and Dustin end up at a State Rehabilitation Facility, where they discover the shocking truth behind the Banks’ disappearance and the government’s water monopoly.
THE CLOUD SEEDERS is a fairly typical YA dystopian fantasy novel coupled with a coming-of-age story that reads like a cross between John Steinbeck’s classic The Grapes of Wrath and John Christopher’s cult science fiction novel, No Blade of Grass. Although all the ramifications of this drought-ridden society don’t seem totally worked out, the author does a much better job giving us a unique relationship between Thomas and Jerusha. Some unconventional elements might not seem totally believable, and Thomas’ frames of reference sometimes seem a little too mature for his years. Otherwise, this novel is written in a confident, confidential first-person voice that pushes the reader past much of what is wrong with the story.
THE CLOUD SEEDERS is a lively coming-of-age story that takes place against an only partly convincing dystopian backdrop of a world without water.
Reviewed by Kenneth Salikof for IndieReader.