I really liked <I>Station Eleven</I> a lot. I'm a sucker for this story: After the Fall, now what? Maybe proof of this enduring fascination is my championing of <a href="https://expendablemudge.blogspot.com/2014/08/earth-abides-65-year-old-post.html" target="_blank"><i>Earth Abides</i></a> (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljLVhUwfdZw" target="_blank">now a TV show</a>) and <a href="https://expendablemudge.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-day-of-triffids-apocalypse-now-all.html" target="_blank"><i>Day of the Triffids</i></a>. The genre presents a long tail of goodwill, then, as well as wide scope for action set in the present. This story is split between the present crisis...being flooded out of their home on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History...and how things came to be so terrible that this is where their home needs to be.

A really good story idea, one that has a lot of genuine and affecting emotional resonance; then uses up its narrative momentum by structuring the past as flashbacks. Once or twice, okay; more than that it becomes a real drag. Start the story in the past. Trust the reader to invest in the characters, and rip our lungs out by showing us in real time what's happening. It felt to me the author was cushioning the blow by using this method of storytelling.

So no fifth star from me.

Four stars were assured when this happened:
<blockquote>“Hell, it was happening, I saw it happening. But I couldn’t picture it, you know? I couldn’t picture how we’d lose the seasons, how it would be tropical heat in November, but still have blizzards that melted into heat waves. I couldn’t picture the way the storms come and then come back. Not the polar cold fronts in the south. Not the new hurricanes, the hot winters, the king tides, the typhoons going east then west then east again. It should have been easy to see. It was in the data.”</blockquote>

This is exactly and precisely how I've been feeling about others' apparent inability to retain the thread between the past climate events and their all-but-certain genesis. My problem is that I *can* picture it and am cursed with seeing it before my appalled eyes...it's like, in the space of thirty-nine years, I've moved from New York to Maryland. Without moving an inch.

I won't live long enough (I hope) to see this novel's world in the flesh. I expect that, if I'm cursed to do so, it will look a lot like this. It was Author Caffall's gift to me to make me a lot gladder that I'm really old and fairly infirm.

The reason I hope you'll read it, though, is that its sisters Nonie and Bix are the kind of kids we should all strive to raise. They are resilient, they are resourceful, they are respectful of the limited resources they can command and mindful of their good fortune, they are angry enough to work for more and humble enough to know what "enough" means.

They made the issues I had with the structure into cavils. Had I not had them to invest my emotional energy into, I would've enjoyed the story a lot less. As it is, I do recommend it, and hope you'll take this as your nudge to see what a wounded planet will do to heal itself.

This book was a fascinating look at a future state where the climate on earth has become severe and things like "hyper-canes" are possibilities and part of the vocabulary. Lots of buildings underwater, lots of coastal and island communities no longer exist. No apparent government really, more marshal law and communities cropping up where they can based on the changing environmental landscape.

It was fascinating in the fact that parts of it felt feasible and really hit close to home with the major storms that we're seeing now on a regular basis and the way that the climate/coastal borders are changing. A lot of the supporting detail of the storyline felt very believable and generally realistic in the way of a post-apocalyptic, dystopian, science fiction novel. I thought the MCs were fairly well developed and the characters that they met along the way supported the storyline and added to the narrative.

I did think this was a bit of a choppy story at times, it didn't feel super literary, but much more choppy and abrupt in places. Maybe it felt like it was lacking a little emotion in some of the story telling. These characters have lost so much and really adapted their lifestyle to the point where it felt like their emotions or reactions to certain situations were a little muted. I did get some Station Eleven vibes - maybe just in that they felt similar from a dystopian reality point of view. Thank you to SMP/Macmillan for the eARC to read.

This was probably my first climate science fiction book and I am not sure this genre is for me, but I am glad I gave it a try!

All The Water In The World follows a group of people living on top of the American Museum of Natural History after a mega tsunami flooded New York City with water. The main character, Nonnie, is a 7 year old girl, living with her family, who has a strong sense for water movement. She can even sense when the next storm is coming. This story follows Nonnie and her family as they escape from another flood and find a new place to settle.

What I liked about this book:
-The premise was definitely interesting and I was intrigued right from the start
-The author was very good at building that eerie and uneasy feeling that loomed over the story
-I am a water person as well - not to the same degree as Nonnie, but I always gravitate towards water in times of stress/discomfort. This book was fun to read because of that additional sci-fi element.

What I didn't like:
-It felt very boring and slow throughout most of the book. I felt like the synopsis basically gives away so much of the book that I just wasn't excited by the story itself. It just felt like it was missing something.
-It also felt a little too sci-fi for my liking. I don't think I realized how much of a magical element this had and it was just a bit much for me.

Overall this book was okay. It was intriguing and had an interesting premise but it ultimately fell short for me.

Finished up this new release yesterday and it was good….

But there were places for improvement? Overall, I love a good climate-based post-apocalyptic book (or a movie) and I liked the way this one went. The world has flooded and a group of former museum workers and family are stuck in the museum where they begin to rebuild life. Waters rise and they must make a tough decision to leave or stay.

I think my major places that this one didn’t work was 1. We didn’t get much info on how it happened. I wanted more. 2. They left the museum sooooo fast. 3. The plot overall just flies by after they leave the museum that it will give you whiplash. I think there were plenty of prices that could have been fleshed out more but it wasn’t bad considering all the plot that happens.

A beautiful story of survival in the midst of societal collapse due to flooding. Let’s talk about All the Water in the World by Aaron Caffle

All the Water in the World is literary post-apocalyptic fiction in the vein of Station Eleven or Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. The story focuses on a teenage girl named Norie who lives with her family and other survivors on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City after a catastrophic flood leaves much of the city under water. The colony on the roof, called AMEN, is made up of people connected to the museum who have taken on the responsibility of preserving all of the knowledge and artifacts in the face of the disaster. After several years, a massive storm destroys their sanctuary and forces them to flee inland, seeking a new place to live. From here, the book becomes the story of a journey as Norie and her family (both biological and found) navigate the ruins of a flooded world and all of the dangers - both environmental and human - that it contains.

I really liked the characters in this book. Many of them are scientists or the children of scientists, so there is quite a bit of scientific language and conversation about extinctions and preservation and finding ways to use the natural elements that survived the flood to keep life going in the aftermath. The book is told from the perspective of a 13 year old girl with limited knowledge about the world before or much of the current world, but fairly extensive knowledge of the scientific world, so we get most of our information and understanding of what’s happening from that limited, but engaging perspective.

The beauty of this book is in the language. Even when describing devastation, Caffle does it in a way that is vivid and evokes a wistfulness about what was lost. Her descriptions of the different kinds of water and rain reflect a culture for which water has become the centerpiece of their existence. All that said, the descriptions are still simplistic in language, reflecting the limitations of a 13 year old’s perspective.

The other thing I loved about this book is the tone. It is about a journey across a broken landscape where there is loss and ruin, but there is a constant thread of hope that finds its way through the book, even in the most difficult moments. It is stark and emotional, but it isn’t bleak. Don’t get me wrong, I love a bleak end of the world story, but this was a great change of pace.

All the water in the world is climate fiction, but it’s not done with a heavy hand. The flashbacks provide some insight into a slow decline that led to the catastrophic flooding, but it doesn’t get too political or preachy. The flooding is the context for the story as opposed to some other climate fiction where the story is just there to provide a framework for a discussion of climate change.

The narrative structure of the book takes a minute to get used to - the early chapters bounce back and forth between the current time and flashbacks to the initial storm that led the family to AMEN. This flashback format continues throughout the book, giving context to some of the emotions and reactions of characters in the current timeline and adding to the emotion of the story as we get glimpses into the joys and struggles of life at AMEN.

I’m a sucker for books about societal collapse and I particularly enjoy books like this that focus more on the aftermath of the collapse than the big thing that happened. This is a book about people and how they find a way to survive together in the wake of disaster. Even the bad guys are just doing what they do because it’s the way they’ve figured out how to make it. So if you’re fan of climate fiction or books about survival in the face of collapse, I highly recommend All the Water in the World by Aaron Caffle. Check it out and let me know what you think.

2.75 rounded up

While I can see the similarities to Station Eleven as noted in the description, I think the main character’s supposed age throws that off. Nonie is a thirteen year old girl who has been caught in an apocalyptic world from a very early age. Yet, she doesn’t sound like a teenager. I had to suspend a lot of disbelief about what a teenage girl would usually be like, especially since she had a sister a few years older with her. The situation would have made both children grow up incredibly quickly, but I think there are just some things that are hardwired into being adolescents that did not come across in these characters. I could also see if it was written as memory, shaping the child’s view from an adult’s perspective, but based on the last chapter in the book, I don’t think that’s the case. Overall, I enjoyed my time with this book and would recommend it to fans of the comparable novel, but it’s not something I would put in everyone’s hands. I would have liked to see more from the time before or at least a better understanding of how The World As It Is got to be that way.

This book is told from the perspective of Nonie, a young girl born after the glaciers melted and the seas rose, the World As It Is, as she calls it. She's only ever heard stories of the World As It Was. She lives with her father, sister and a small community of scientists on the roof of New York's Natural History Museum, refusing to leave without saving some of the history and artifacts preserved there. Nonie has an interesting connection to water and can feel when storms are coming, but the hypercane hit with no warning destroying their home, knocking out the flood gates holding back the ocean, forcing them to escape the city in a small canoe with only four survivors. Along their way to discover a new place they can call home, they encounter communities both helpful and hostile, ever stronger storms and natural disaster, and the struggle to survive with little to no food or water.
I loved reading the story from this young girl's unique perspective, as someone who didn't know anything different. She's lost so many people she cared about and the chapters jump back and forth between the past others told her about, her life growing up in the Museum, and trying to survive after they lost their home. The story starts off a little slow to give some background, but once I got into it I was fascinated. The beautiful and terrifying cover of a city underwater was what drew me in, but the story inside was even better!

Eiran Caffall's All the Water in the World is yes, speculative cli-fi. But it's also a coming-of-age story as our 13yo narrator Norrie deals with so much grief and hope and resiliency. The looming ominousness of all the Storms and their fallout is like a main character we rarely meet but when we do, there is significant trauma. Caffall's gorgeous prose wends through valleys and rivers of despair and fatigue without ever giving up. The setting too, deserves praise - the American Museum of Natural History and Hudson River in NYC define the story. Wonderful, wonderful book

This one sounded so interesting, but was ultimately too slow paced and didn't hold my attention. The writing style was excellent, but this one just wasn't my favorite.

This book is a masterpiece—a hauntingly accurate portrayal of what the global warming crisis could look like in the near future. The journey the characters embark on and the people they meet along the way showcase humanity at both its best and worst. It’s the kind of story that offers endless opportunities for academic analysis, but I’ll leave that to someone else.

What struck me most was how visceral and terrifying the story felt. It gave me nightmares because of how scarily plausible it all seemed. Coming from living in NYC, the vivid descriptions of landmarks submerged or transformed by climate change hit me hard. The creepiest part was when they were only ten feet below the span of the George Washington Bridge, which stands 212 feet above the water at its center. Imagining the water levels rising that high was deeply unsettling. 

The writing was undeniably poetic and beautiful, but it occasionally bordered on being too flowery. At times, it was hard to follow the plot because I couldn’t tell what was figurative and what was literal. That said, the prose effectively captured the inner dialogue of a young girl, pulling me into the trek from her perspective. The characters felt raw and real, and the events were so lifelike they forced the reader to fully grasp the gravity of the situation.

However, the portrayal of the girls as teenagers felt inconsistent; they often came across as much younger, which seemed at odds with the self-sufficiency their environment would necessitate. Additionally, Nonie’s seemingly magical ability to predict storms detracted from the story’s realism; grounding this trait in a pseudo-scientific explanation could have enhanced believability. The ending, while leaning towards a “happily ever after” resolution, felt slightly out of place given the heavy tone of the rest of the book, though it did provide a sense of closure after such an intense journey.

Despite these minor flaws, the book left a lasting impression on me. It made me confront my own fears about the global warming crisis and how it could shape the world in my lifetime. This is a story that lingers—equal parts terrifying and beautiful. Highly recommended.

I was really interested in the dystopian/post-apocalyptic/thriller aspects of this book, but ultimately it wasn't for me, due to the writing style and overall slow pace. In a flooded, post-glacier New York City, All the Water in the World follows Nonie and her family as they make a home on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History, preserving artifacts while living off a wild Central Park. When a massive storm breaks through the city’s defenses, they’re forced to escape up the Hudson River, facing strange and sometimes dangerous new communities along the way. With a treasured book of records in tow, they fight to create a future that remembers the past.

The first 30%/35% are very slow and I wouldn't say that I got very interested in the story until about the 50% mark. It was definitely a thought-provoking book, and I did appreciate the glimpses into the post-apocalyptic world that we got. The writing style is fragmented, impressionistic, and immersive, and it uses short, abrupt sentences or sentence fragments to create a sense of immediacy and tension. This style of writing is often used in literary fiction or speculative thrillers, so if you like those types of books, it'll be no issue for you. I did really like the ending, I thought it was very fitting for the story.

Thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press, and the author Eiren Caffall for the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This was really good. It took me a bit of time to sink into the writing style, but the plot was enough to pull me through until that happened. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time.

After seeing comparisons to Station Eleven, All the Water in the World was a must read. The story starts with family and friends living in the American Museum of Natural History in a dystopian/post-apocalyptic society. A massive flood forces them from their home and Nonie and her family must fight for survival.
This book is a coming of age story that deals with climate change, love, loss, perseverance. My favorite parts of the book were the chapters in the present time; the alternating back and forth between the past and present did not hold my attention. I wanted to love this book, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I hoped to.
If you enjoy literary post-apocalyptic and climate fiction, you might want to give this a go.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for this ARC.

Thanks for the ARC!

I have a thing for hopeful apocalyptic stories where even in the face of terrible things, people stick to each other and to creating things. This was a great read with a lovely protagonist and insights into climate change.

All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall is a powerful debut that brings into stark relief the devastating effects on humanity that can come from climate change. It feels eerily prescient and like a call to action amidst the current tragedy unfolding in Los Angeles. Literature helps shine a light on the lessons of our time when done well, and this is a prime example. May we learn those lessons.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me.

This was a great cli-fi story. I really loved the characters, and I was rooting for them throughout. I've heard comparisons to Station Eleven, and I would say Station Eleven-lite. While I adored the story and the characters, I wasn't wowed by the writing. I did think the author can tell a story, though.

Nonie and her family live on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, at a time when the glaciers have melted and the city is mostly deserted. There is no government, no electricity, and no contact with the outside world. When a massive hypercane floods everything, they must leave the museum they’ve been carefully protecting to find safety elsewhere. I liked the idea of the story but I found it a bit slow. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martins Press for an ARC of the story.

I enjoyed the character development. The plot was much too slow for me, especially with such an anxiety provoking topic.

A word of warning: don't start this book if you've got something else to do! Because you won't be able to put it down, I guarantee you. It's an amazing post-Apocalyptic story about water water everywhere, and no place to go to get away from it. When the polar ice caps melt, what happens to all the water? According to this book, the oceans rise so much that cities are uninhabitable, society breaks down, and medicines are more valuable than anything else. You'll read about Norah and her desire to live, regardless of what else is happening--and believe me, stuff is happening on every page. So buckle in, you're in for the ride of your life. Don't miss this one!

This book was beautifully done and helps show the impact climate change will have on us. The focus on the history of humankind and not leaving the good things behind. This is a gorgeous story of survival, of moving forward, and of insuring to find humanity in the darkest of places.

Honestly, I really think everyone should read this book. And it should probably be adapted into a film.