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A review by luckyonesoph
All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.25
Haunting, horrifying, important.
All the Water in the World is a story of survival. Nonie, an autistic-coded teenager, lives with her family on the roof of the abandoned American Museum of Natural History because catastrophic floods have ravaged New York City, rendering it an uninhabitable and completely lawless place. Nonie grows up learning all she can from the museum as the rooftop community works to preserve and protect what they can of the museum's collections. When an especially devastating hypercane hits, Nonie and her family are forced to flee. The question is: will they make it to safety, with all that they saved from the world as it was?
What I liked: No better time for climate fiction than right now, as we watch communities all over the world struggle to recover from natural disasters that get closer and closer and closer to home. Even though this book is shelved as sci-fi and dystopia, it felt extremely realistic - scarily realistic actually - and we need more of that, because a lot of people are really comfortable pretending the climate catastrophe simply won't affect them from inside their million-dollar Manhattan homes. I also liked the emphasis on preservation, the reverence for our shared planetary histories, the call-backs to wars and disasters and lootings that have threatened those histories before. I liked the neurodivergent representation, and the harsh but necessary reminder that disability, disease, and chronic health complications are intimately tied to the climate crisis, and are coming for us all.
What didn't work for me: This book is thematically urgent, but I am already a person who is constantly stressed out about the state of the world, so I didn't need any convincing on that front. Unfortunately, this book didn't feel temporally urgent. I couldn't put my finger on why the pacing wasn't working out for me, but this was just....a little bit boring, and a little bit slow. I expected more from a book marketed as a thriller, and at the same time, the meditations on art and collections and preservation didn't feel weighty enough to offset the lack of tension. I understand that the author made a deliberate stylistic choice to make the narrator a young neurodivergent girl who is so clearly traumatized by the only life she's known, it seemed to halt the flow of the narrative moreso than it helped the tone, worldbuilding, and reflection. I see it, I understand it, it just didn't work for me. The choppy cuts to different points of Nonie's life made it hard for me to follow the story at times, and there was an emotional disconnect between her narration of the events and the chaos you assume is unfolding. For a water-logged world, the events of the novel read very neat and dry.
Lastly - and I will not let this part affect my rating, because I know it's not in the author's control - please stop comping books to Station Eleven that come nowhere near it in terms of emotional weight or prose. You're just setting the book up for failure. I know comps had to be tough for this one, but still.
Ultimately, I think this is a very timely, very important read, and I will reccomend it to friends who I know will appreciate it. I just don't think it accomplishes all that its trying to do, and I didn't have the greatest time reading it. Sometimes books like that make for good reads anyways.
Thank you NetGalley and SMP for the advanced e-copy of this book.
All the Water in the World is a story of survival. Nonie, an autistic-coded teenager, lives with her family on the roof of the abandoned American Museum of Natural History because catastrophic floods have ravaged New York City, rendering it an uninhabitable and completely lawless place. Nonie grows up learning all she can from the museum as the rooftop community works to preserve and protect what they can of the museum's collections. When an especially devastating hypercane hits, Nonie and her family are forced to flee. The question is: will they make it to safety, with all that they saved from the world as it was?
What I liked: No better time for climate fiction than right now, as we watch communities all over the world struggle to recover from natural disasters that get closer and closer and closer to home. Even though this book is shelved as sci-fi and dystopia, it felt extremely realistic - scarily realistic actually - and we need more of that, because a lot of people are really comfortable pretending the climate catastrophe simply won't affect them from inside their million-dollar Manhattan homes. I also liked the emphasis on preservation, the reverence for our shared planetary histories, the call-backs to wars and disasters and lootings that have threatened those histories before. I liked the neurodivergent representation, and the harsh but necessary reminder that disability, disease, and chronic health complications are intimately tied to the climate crisis, and are coming for us all.
What didn't work for me: This book is thematically urgent, but I am already a person who is constantly stressed out about the state of the world, so I didn't need any convincing on that front. Unfortunately, this book didn't feel temporally urgent. I couldn't put my finger on why the pacing wasn't working out for me, but this was just....a little bit boring, and a little bit slow. I expected more from a book marketed as a thriller, and at the same time, the meditations on art and collections and preservation didn't feel weighty enough to offset the lack of tension. I understand that the author made a deliberate stylistic choice to make the narrator a young neurodivergent girl who is so clearly traumatized by the only life she's known, it seemed to halt the flow of the narrative moreso than it helped the tone, worldbuilding, and reflection. I see it, I understand it, it just didn't work for me. The choppy cuts to different points of Nonie's life made it hard for me to follow the story at times, and there was an emotional disconnect between her narration of the events and the chaos you assume is unfolding. For a water-logged world, the events of the novel read very neat and dry.
Lastly - and I will not let this part affect my rating, because I know it's not in the author's control - please stop comping books to Station Eleven that come nowhere near it in terms of emotional weight or prose. You're just setting the book up for failure. I know comps had to be tough for this one, but still.
Ultimately, I think this is a very timely, very important read, and I will reccomend it to friends who I know will appreciate it. I just don't think it accomplishes all that its trying to do, and I didn't have the greatest time reading it. Sometimes books like that make for good reads anyways.
Thank you NetGalley and SMP for the advanced e-copy of this book.