I’m inclined to agree with the lower rated reviews on this book - so much climate fiction out there and this one is squarely in the ho-hum pile, alas. While it’s not bad, it <i>is</i> a basic and shallowly told story. The journey is fine, the characters are fine, the ending is fine .. and fine isn’t what I super want to spend my time on? I didn’t mind the dual narrative in the first third, if anything I felt it gave more substance to the story by giving us somewhat of a window into what happened before, but that tapers off and leaves the reader with point A to point B monotony without much to jazz it up. I appreciated the lesson being that they would build a new safe space / society by letting in vs. hoarding / keeping out, but this was just all right at best, whatever and unsatisfying at the worst.

<i>Thanks to St. Martin’s Press for an eARC of this book. 🙏🏼</i>

The story is packed with so many wonderful moments and details, that I have barely scratched the surface in this review. All the Water In the World would make a fantastic movie, and it sort of reminded me of the Netflix movie Leave the World Behind. My favorite apocalyptic stories are the ones that leave the reader with a feeling of hope, and this one does that brilliantly.

This is really enthralling book. I love the look at what could happen in the future if all the ice has melted and water has consumed the world.
These characters are strong and do what it takes to survive.
I enjoyed watching Nonie, how smart she is and how brave she is throughout the journey. She protects her sister Bix and helps her along the way.
This is a fast paced book, that keeps you reading, as you want to see what will happen to these characters.

Thank NetGalley for this ARC.

An excellent dystopian/climate fiction novel set in a not too far future where the icebergs have all melted and the world is hot, flooded, no electricity, and worse. The book is told from the perspective of 13 year old Nonie, who has been living at the American Museum of Natural History with her family and a small group of other workers and their families since NYC flooded. The book alternates between the night of a terrible storm when the remaining survivors decide it’s time to leave the museum and head north, and flashbacks to Nonie’s memories of the years they have spent living there and her hazy memories of before.

I thought this one was just fabulous - literary writing that was spare and yet deep, interesting characters, and scenes I could really picture in my head. It’s often sad and scary but with a little bit of hope. Think Station Eleven crossed with The Light Pirate, with a dash of The Road or The Passage. Definitely one that will stay with me.

4.5 stars

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for an early copy of this book!

4.5 stars rounded up

I didn’t expect to love this book as much as I did! At its core, it’s a story of survival—it follows a young girl named Nonie and her family in an apocalyptic world where New York City has flooded and they find refuge with other people in what used to the American Museum of Natural History. But when a massive storm destroys the settlement they’ve built, they have to make the difficult decision to head north for survival.

It took me a minute to get into this book, but once I was in, I was hooked! The short chapters really build tension, as we follow Nonie’s journey and see her flashbacks to the World As It Was. I think it’s best to go into this book not knowing much about it, but it’s a story of family, memory, and recording for the next generation. It’s an emotional journey, with both literary and thriller aspects, but it ultimately feels like a genre of its own.

This flooded, apocalyptic world feels like it could never happen to us, but with the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, our relationship with the earth feels so fragile, and this world doesn’t seem that far off. This book particularly resonated with me because I recognized so many of the New York City and Westchester landmarks that they mention here (though they’re destroyed or underwater in this world).

Thanks to Netgalley for a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A young girl lives in the American Museum of Natural History as the oceans are rising and storms are destroying the land. A super interesting premise to me, especially as a childhood reader of From the Mixed-Up Files... This book had a bit of a slow start, and the character was definitely a child and did not always know or understand what was happening. The author also chose to move forward and backward in time, and seemed to delay some of the world building that helped to set the scene. I almost DNF'd around 25% and then the book finally started to move and make sense. I think there are parts of it that I'll be thinking about for a while, so I am giving 4 stars instead of the 3 the overall writing earned in my mind.

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.