Reviewed by S. Cox, June 2021
What do you do when all of the water in the world is contaminated, when a single drop of the contaminated water will kill you?
That’s what 15 year old Ruby Morris finds herself wondering in the time following a certain day in Britain; the day that the rain came down, and with it, death. Even as the government warns people to remain calm and stay at home, chaos ensues. Everyone panics, desperate for a chance to live, any chance at all. Soon, it’s a near-constant battle for survival, and things don’t look as if they’ll be getting better any time soon: drinkable water - and time - are quickly running out. Ruby must decide if she will hunker down in the relative safety of her home to wait out the storm, or if she will undertake a perilous journey across the country to find her father - if he’s even one of the 0.27% of the population that survived.
I quite enjoyed H2O. I was on the edge of my seat almost the entire time I was reading the novel, and simply could not put it down. The author skillfully weaves the plot line as she brings the world of H2O to life; so skillfully, in fact, that I was unconsciously avoiding water for the rest of the afternoon. She makes you really feel what the characters are going through, makes you connect with them. H2O is a novel for either gender, though it is definitely not for younger readers, as the death, violence, injury descriptions, and swearing would likely be too much for them. Something I liked about the novel is that all of the swear words are replaced by butterflies, so if you’re like me and don’t swear and/or don’t like having to read swear words in books, you don’t have to. If you liked The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey, then you’d probably like this. I’m looking forward to getting H2O‘s sequel, The Storm. Happy reading!