{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"","title":"Gold Fame Citrus: California's Stolen Water","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/6a28001ca917ce4c7065c483/0f3ad39b-0730-4c37-a239-fac894bc42c5.jpg?height=200","description":"When Claire Vaye Watkins published Gold Fame Citrus in 2015, California was four years into a historic drought. The novel imagines the endpoint: a southern California fifty years into a drought that never breaks, its reservoirs gone, a growing dune sea called the Amargosa grinding east from Los Angeles toward Las Vegas. Those who stayed are Mojavs — internal climate refugees whose greener neighbors cage in internment camps. At the novel's center is Luz Dunn, a former conservation-campaign poster child with Chicana roots who steals a child named Ig from a bad party and runs east into the dunes, where a charismatic dowser named Levi leads a nomadic colony on promises of hidden water. The cult dynamics echo Watkins's own biography: her father was Paul Watkins, Charles Manson's chief lieutenant, who broke away, testified at the Tate-LaBianca trial, and raised his daughters in Death Valley. The novel's political target is the architecture of Western water — Owens Valley drained for Los Angeles, the 1922 Colorado River Compact built on inflated river-flow numbers, agricultural water priced at a fraction of what cities pay. Watkins refuses survivalist flattery: her characters find no clever exit, no heroic rebuild. The collapse she depicts is already measurable — in fallowed cropland, sinking valley floors, and falling reservoir lines — because it was always the logical end of a state engineered on a lie about how much water exists.","author_name":"Atween Studios"}