The Droughtlanders Analysis

We typically do not give much thought to what we call “home”. We perceive home as somewhere we go after a long day, somewhere we can enjoy the simpler pleasures in life away from the restlessness of work. However in The Droughtlanders by Carrie Mac, it challenges our general notion of home for an unorthodox one—a notion that a home goes outside of comfort zones, rather than inside them. At face value, the Keys have everything: it is rich, secure, and organized. But by glimpsing outside its walls, we discover that those qualities can bring more problems than we see at first glance. Rather, home is somewhere that we can fully trust and agree morally, somewhere that promotes freedom, but most of all, somewhere that allows us to develop our characters and nurture

However, his entire perspective changed when one day he caught his mother embracing an elderly Droughtlander within the Key walls, to which he became immensely concerned at his mother catching an illness by being close proximity to one of them. His mother assured him that she would stay healthy, and revealed a tome to Eli. At first he did not understand what the tome’s importance was, but as he read on he found a terrifying fact: “The [Keys] was responsible for the death of ninety-two percent of the world’s population. If all of this was really true, giving up the Keylanders as his people just got easier” (Mac 30). The tome revealed that the Keys cloudseeded their way into power, by stealing any rainclouds using cloudseeders to direct clouds to rain on the Keys, and leave no rain left for anywhere else, making the areas between the Keys parched and thus become the Droughtland. The perspective that Eli gained from reading that passage was massive. The Droughtland had countless people suffering from disease and lack of water because Eli’s own home