“Cinematic, immersive, and absolutely timely. It has the bones of a cult classic."

"Drinking from the Stream isn’t just a debut novel, it’s a high-voltage cocktail of political thriller, action-adventure, and history— Vietnam, the Cultural Revolution, Africa on the cusp of transformation… a fugitive farm boy, a tortured Oxford dropout, and a dangerous plunge into dictatorship and chaos. That’s not 'just a book'… that’s a cinematic gut-punch."

"A political thriller woven with history, action, and the kind of raw human struggle most authors only pretend to pull off."

"Powerful. A raw, globetrotting mix of Vietnam-era upheaval, post-independence Africa, and a fugitive oil roughneck who accidentally kills a white supremacist before colliding with an Oxford dropout. A powderkeg."

"Action-adventure grit with historical and political depth."

“Bold, thoughtful… reads like a story meant to be discussed in book clubs, classrooms, and maybe one day adapted for screen.”

"I ... immediately felt that electric sense of discovery that happens when a novel captures both personal restlessness and global upheaval."

"... a rare fusion of political intensity and coming-of-age humanity, where the turbulence of the Vietnam era mirrors the storm inside a generation searching for meaning.”

"Jake Ries’s journey from Nebraska [to a Louisiana] oil rig to post-independence Africa reads like an epic of conscience, raw, physical, and beautifully haunted."

"… [the] storytelling moves between moral reckoning and adventure, evoking both Hemingway’s physicality and Greene’s political nuance. It’s the kind of novel that stays in the bloodstream long after the last page."

"Drinking from the Stream doesn’t just tell a story it detonates one."

"… the ideological chaos of the early ’70s Vietnam, the Cultural Revolution, post-independence Africa ... filtered ... through the moral exhaustion of youth running from both war and themselves... less “fiction” and more an emotional field report from humanity’s tipping point.”

"Jake Ries isn’t a fugitive; he’s a mirror. Karl Appel isn’t a dropout; he’s the echo of a generation that learned too much and trusted too little." 

"… [the] prose feels like a dispatch written in adrenaline and moral philosophy. The kind of novel that should be taught in political literature courses…"