A lengthy California drought escalates to catastrophic proportions, turning Alyssa's quiet suburban street into a warzone, and she is forced to make impossible choices if she and her brother are to survive. The drought--or the Tap-Out, as everyone calls it--has been going on for a while now. 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. Until the taps run dry. Suddenly,...

"A cumulative rhyme relating how Ki-pat brought rain to the drought-stricken Kapiti Plain" -- Title page verso.

Lord Cat lives a lavish lifestyle until drought strikes Hunger Mountain, but when he goes to seek sustenance, he finds much more than food.

In Mississippi in the early 1900s ten-year-old David Logan's family generously shares their well water with both white and black neighbors in an atmosphere of potential racial violence.