A dystopian look at the future of sea level rise is a scary, tragic read. There’s also hope, love and determination. ALL THE WATER IN THE WORLD is set in a future, walled-off city to start, but events go badly wrong for the small band of survivors.
Some readers may be unsure of the location to begin with because it’s just called the old city, but in Chapter 10 we’re clearly told this used to be New York City. Non-Americans aren’t necessarily going to know where the American Museum of Natural History is located. Here, in a tent on the roof, we meet young teens Nonie and her older sister Bix. Their parents worked here. A hypercane barrels through – an even worse hurricane than usual – and the city’s flood walls are breached.
The building flooding around them, the small family and another researcher, Keller, have to take to the Hudson River in a restored canoe. They’re heading inland, north, which they should have done years ago. I get the impression the author Eiren Caffall may have written the book in sequential order, then started at the dramatic storm surge and filled in between chapters with flashbacks to how the family tried to save the collections, the girls growing up playing among cases and stacks, planting food in a park with feral, hungry dogs and scavenging in looted stores. This slows the forward action but gives an idea of how life changed and how the empty city seemed survivable. Until it wasn’t.
I did find the events upsetting at times, as life is at great risk without antibiotics or electricity, with desperate men and control freaks, in unpredictable and vicious weather. This book probably isn’t a read for anyone under fifteen, but older readers may get impatient with Nonie and her sometimes slow telling. Still, we know happy people don’t write diaries about their comfort, and we can all learn which survival skills might be useful from Nonie’s struggles.
Looking at what a dire future might come to pass, is important, to know what we would preserve as a society, and how. What kind of farmstead would be needed to thrive, what would happen to military bases and their stores? If computers are dead and rusted, what happens to the records? Eiren Caffall has written a book to set us thinking and to inspire a movement towards avoidance of dystopia. ALL THE WATER IN THE WORLD swells when the planet’s ice turns to liquid, and only so much can be done to survive this outcome. Read it and ask what you would do.
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.
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