Red Lemonade

For a limited time, download the complete ebook at http://www.joshuamalbin.com/soap-and-water. Audio chapters also available at the same link. Soap and Water tells the story of five Americans trying to find their way home through a broken country mired in a senseless occupation. Reporter Meg Anthony works from an embedded position at the front lines, endangering her life and those of the people around her. Her guide Wyatt Foley must choose between loyalty to a cause and his own future. Tough girl Veronica has never known a world without war and occupation. Smuggler 'Tit Jean wants to save his kidnapped son. Rebel leader Cutt hopes his fight against an illegal occupation can drown out his yearning for alcoholic oblivion. Their war, with its embedded reportage, occupied territory, violence and corruption, echoes the current ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it takes place in the mountain and desert United States of the near future, transformed by something like the Tea Party movement run amok. Splinter American governments of East and West have taken up arms against one another, riven by the same concerns that shape life in the West today. Individual liberty butts up against federal government. Religion and race set neighbors against one another. The scarcity of water threatens to undo civilization's tenuous encroachments against the desert. For generations, storytellers and leaders, warriors and con men alike have staked their claims in the archetypes and myths of the American West. Self-reliance and self-invention have long struggled against civilization and coexistence in our country’s literature, its politics and its culture. In Soap and Water that struggle has erupted with uncanny familiarity into a 21st-century American Civil War.