A review by __apf__
After the Flood by Kassandra Montag

3.0

After the Flood is a straightforward post-apocalyptic survival story: a mother loses one of her two daughters in a flood that swallows the world, and she spends the whole book trying to get her lost daughter back. Ships! Storms! Pirates! It was a fun read.

The book leans heavily on the emotional imagery of motherhood, evoking every parent's fear of losing their child. It brought to mind all of the ways I love and am afraid for my son. However, if you are not the parent of a young child -- or perhaps, if you are a parent who doesn't share these fears -- I could imagine this book falling flat for you. You are meant to imagine yourself as the mother, and live through her on the adventure; apart from that, she is a fairly one-dimensional character.

Despite being a book set in the future about a post-apocalyptic flood, this is not about climate change and it is not science fiction. Extremely little time is spent explaining why the flood happened; it simply did. As a result of the flood, humanity is technologically transported back to the 1700s. If this were a movie, the set would look like Pirates of the Caribbean but with jeans. (These aren't flaws of the book, it simply took me by surprise.)