After The Green Withered Blog Tour // My Initial Thoughts On Chapter One

After The Green Withered by Kristin Ward
Classified as Sci-Fi, Dystopian, & Young Adult
✨I received a digital copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. ✨

They tell me the country looked different back then. They talk of open borders and flowing rivers. They say the world was green. But drought swept across the globe and the United States of the past disappeared under a burning sky.

Enora Byrnes lives in the aftermath, a barren world where water has become the global currency. In a life dominated by duty to family and community, Enora is offered a role within an entity that controls everything from water credits to borders. But it becomes clear that not all is as it seems. From the wasted confines of her small town to the bowels of a hidden city, Enora will uncover buried secrets that hide an unthinkable reality.

As truth reveals the brutal face of what she has become, she must ask herself: how far will she go to retain her humanity?

My Initial Thoughts

Do you remember wayyyyy back in 2011(ish) when YA dystopian novels knocked the crown off the gorgeous-sparkling-vampire craze and became the next BIG THING™ in bookland? Suddenly, doomsday literature was the new Tamagotchi or Silly Bandz; every major Publishing House just had to have their own. Library shelves and bookstores alike were exploding with them all and readers couldn’t get enough: The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Selection, Delirium, Matched, Legend…you get the idea.

Due to Dystopian burnout, it has been awhile since I ventured into this subgenre again, but when I heard that The Write Reads Gang was organizing a blog tour for After the Green Withered by Kristin Ward, I decided that it was time to stop this embargo and volunteer as tribute.

Reading the first few chapters of this book felt nostalgic in a way; it followed a familiar formula that reminded me of some of my favorite books from high school (see list above) and brought back a lot of memories from my teenage years.

The story begins in a very typical YA fashion: the female MC (who is in this case named Enora) wakes up and starts getting ready for her day. There’s even the mandatory Mirror Scene™ – you know the one I mean. It’s where the MC inspects herself in the mirror and the author uses it as a chance to describe her appearance in more detail than is strictly necessary.

When Enora even goes as far to say, “I will never be considered a beauty,” I felt that the author was doing a pretty darn good job at recreating the type of female protagonist that was popularized in those early 2010s Dystopian novels.

“My memories of childhood are plagued by water, or rather the lack of water.”

Although there was a lot of TELLING instead of SHOWING going on in both the prologue and the first chapter of After the Green Withered (Be warned: THE INFODUMPING IS STRONG WITH THIS ONE), it felt almost wistful to revisit this subgenre’s well-hashed conventions. The presentation and set up of the novel might not be considered groundbreaking, but certainly the unique idea of humans destroying the environment so completely as to turn water into a global currency shines through. It offers a strong political commentary that feels particularly relevant today and I look forward to seeing where the rest of the plot will take us.

“And through it all, fingers of blame, rather than solutions to the root cause, became the norm as scientific evidence was censored.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristin Ward has loved writing since middle school but took thirty years to do something serious about it. The result is her Best Indie Book Award-winning novel, After the Green Withered, followed by the sequel, Burden of Truth. She lives in a small town in Connecticut with her husband, three sons, and many furry and feathered friends. A Sci-Fi geek to the core, she is fueled by dark chocolate and coffee and can be heard quoting eighties movies on a regular basis.

Her Website //  Her Twitter // Her Books2Read Page

What are some of your favorite dystopian novels?

Have you read any of the dystopian books that I mentioned in this post?

What do you think about After the Green Withered? Does it sound interesting to you?