O Greenest Branch!

A small, isolated kingdom has spent three hundred years fighting an unrelenting drought and the internal conflicts that scarcity breeds. When diplomats from the Righteous States of America arrive offering relief, it looks at first like salvation. But foreign aid rarely arrives without strings, and the kingdom's people, including Sari, a woman granted youth and beauty by the local Goddess, find that the price of rescue is higher than anyone expected.

The novel is the opening book of Gael Baudino's Water! trilogy, an alternate-history fantasy that uses a drought-stricken kingdom and an intrusive foreign power to examine faith, environmental collapse, and the uneasy line between help and control.

O Greenest Branch! sets up the trilogy's central tension between the kingdom's old magic and the newcomers' rigid, righteous certainty about what's best for everyone else.