All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall

Jan 27

Synopsis

In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York’s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved.

Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story—with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most – love and work, community and knowledge – will survive.

*Blurb taken from The StoryGraph

Review

This review contains spoilers.

Characters: Our narrator in this novel is Nonie, a thirteen-year-old girl who has grown up in what society calls The World As It Is, meaning after the melting of the glaciers, the flooding of the land, and the collapse of the planet’s known climate patterns. Nonie is neurodivergent, telling this story in an almost-detached, observant manner that lacks the intensity expected in survivalist situations. While I do believe some people might find it difficult to connect to our protagonist because of both this and her juvenile way of explaining some situations (appropriate for her age), I found Nonie’s voice to be both captivating and reflective. She gave a perfect narration for a piece that is apocalyptic science fiction in genre, but more literary and lyrical in tone.

The novel has a wide net of a cast, with some characters alive in the present, and others only introduced in chapters where Nonie sifts through past memories, such as her time with Mother and her friend, Mono. We spend a majority of the story with Father, Bix (Nonie’s older sister), and Keller (another refugee from Amen). The secondary characters were distinct and well crafted, though none of them felt truly fleshed out. Not even Bix or Keller. Which could, again, be due to Nonie’s particular voice, but I would have liked more of these two.

Plot: Told in both the past and the present, Nonie’s story flips back and forth between the day of the hypercane that sends the main plot of the book spiraling forward, and the time at the beginning of The World As It Is, when her family first fled to the American Museum of Natural History (shortened to Amen) in New York as a means of refuge from the drowning world.

This novel has a staggeringly slow pace, and there are a multitude of reasons why. The time jumps at the beginning were sudden and contributed to an initial lack of understanding about The World As It Is. There was also a contemplative, reflective tone to this story, as opposed to the urgent voice one might expect given the “thriller” marketing. Lastly, the goal of Nonie’s group—to reach her mother’s family farm just outside of the city—seemed a bit like an after-thought despite the entire journey being centered on this safe-haven. (I think this is because we know from the beginning that Nonie is looking back on both of these time periods from a future point, and she is passive in her recounting of the events. We know she made it. And since the secondary characters aren’t fleshed out, I wasn’t as invested in the potential of losing them.) Despite being thoroughly intrigued by the world-build and the climate disasters, as well as needing to know how the journey ends, I found my mind wandering as I listened to the story, and I’d have to stop and rewind to find out what I missed when I zoned out. I don’t think I needed a different narrative voice or overall tone, but I would have liked the purpose—to get to the farm—to have been more high stakes. Either that, or to have had a deeper understanding about the state of the world as a whole—not just New York—then had the fate of it tied back into as the main storyline via the museum preservation and the new society built with Keller, Byron, etc. There was something missing that made most of the novel feel quite anticlimactic despite the severity of the journey.

All of this being said, I thought about this novel for days after I finished it, and I couldn’t stop recommending it to others (with the disclaimer of slow pacing and climate literary fiction, not heart-thumping survivalist thriller). The questions asked are what makes this a standout for me. Questions like: Who does it benefit? What brought us to collapse? Why were we so unprepared? Who do we become (as individuals/a society) in the face of a new, dystopian world? What history do we try to preserve, and at what cost? Etc. I stopped to consider these as I read, pained as I looked at our current presidency (and our current global affairs), knowing that this plot isn’t some far-fetched hypothetical.

Nonie’s story struck me in my gut by the end, even if it took me a second to get there.

Craft: Caffall does a wonderful job of presenting the perspective of Nonie, our young, neurodivergent narrator whose voice displays her lack of socialization and her unusual education. Caffall manages to create some beautiful, elevated, and lyrical prose that matches Nonie’s inquisitive and science-infused mind, while still keeping true to Nonie’s age and peculiar way of viewing the world and interacting with others. The balance of these two, seemingly opposing, aspects of Nonie’s character was masterful. This isn’t to add to the content itself regarding survival, climate change, and so forth. The prose here was stunning. I will be picking up her next book for certain.

Audiobook: Eunice Wong took a beautifully crafted book and voiced it to perfection. If you’re an audio fan, I can’t recommend this narration enough. Nonie feels both naive, yet intelligent, strong, yet terrified, and young, yet wise, her character brought to life by Wong’s interpretation. It is a highlight of storytelling.

Overall Thoughts: Although it took me a good while to feel immersed in this novel, it’s one that has stuck with me well after reading. I continue to untangle new threads as a news headline or a conversation with a friend or a jaunt out to my car reminds me of a point within this story. I enjoyed Nonie as a protagonist; her voice lent such childlike wisdom to a world so unlike—but not far off from—our own. For all I that this book will stick with me, there a sense of imminence that never quite made it onto the page, and the pacing was slow due to the literary angle of the prose. Still, the concepts explored here, as well as the questions asked, made me pause and think. I cannot wait for Caffal’s next novel. Even if the plot doesn’t grab me by the throat, I know the introspection of the characters will follow me like a shroud, and I love that.