Now that I am back in the groove of reading, I thought it was time to get back to pairing books with beer on a semi-regular basis.
The book is “The Water Knife” by Paolo Bacigalupi. (Maybe next month, I will do “Go Set A Watchmen”, or not)
I read the previous Bacigalupi book, “The Wind-Up Girl” and thought it was a fun summer/potential movie script. And his latest follows along the same road, pretty stock characters doing pretty stock things though the ending does toss a curve ball that attempts to “dirty” up the pretty finale. What is frustrating to me is that the setting and backdrop could be used for so much more. Drought and who controls the levers of the water supply is a rich vein to mine. The movie Chinatown worked the edges hard without digging too deep into it and the Water Knife and it’s lead character, Angel could have really been fleshed out and into something deeper. On a side note, Angel as a name doesn’t work for men or women anymore. Way too laden with imagery. If it was a modern day mystery or thriller, I probably would have read it and put it aside without a thought. But this book practically asks for more.
The easy beer to pair with it would be 2020 IPA from Golden Road. This hop bomb was made in conjunction with the LA River 2020 project so you have a nice water tie in and since Calie’s are the “big bad” of the story it works.
A deeper cut could be Tenaya Creek and their Monsoon IPA. It combines the Vegas that is a major part of the story with a heavenly torrent of water that would have really, really been welcomed in this bleak future.