I absolutely loved All the Water in the World (pub. date January 7, 2024) by Eiren Caffall!
This literary climate story is told from the perspective of Nonie, a 13-year old girl who has lived on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History for eight years, with her father, and older sister Bix, and a group of museum employees who used their keys to get in when the first big storm came. Nonie and Bix’s mother died while they were living on the roof, after they had to evacuate their apartment and took refuge in the museum, which they call Amen. Nonie reads to me as being on the autism spectrum, as her family all said that her “brain wasn’t wired like other people’s” and she admits to not understanding how other people feel sometimes. Despite being told from the perspective of a teenager, it’s not YA, but much more literary or like a bildungsroman, as Nonie grows up. She was just five and Bix eight when they had to evacuate their apartment because of the first big flood.
Nonie understands water and seems to be able to feel barometric changes when a storm is headed their way. The narrative shifts back and forth from the current time, when they have to leave Amen, and The Time Before or The World As It Is (during the eight years they spent on the roof of Amen). Nonie and Bix, along with their Father, and Keller, an entomologist who has been on the roof of Amen with them, escape in a canoe saved from the indigenous Eastern Woodlands exhibit. They travel through what remains of Manhattan, up the Hudson. They’re headed for a farm upstate that had been in their Mother’s family for decades.
Nonie keeps a Logbook of water, her most prized possession, kept in oilcloth in her go bag. They encounter both kind people and dangerous ones, some who you can’t tell which they are until it’s almost too late. But Nonie has heard of a ship called the Sally Ride where scientists study the changed climate and she is determined to get there.
Caffall’s writing is beautiful and full of wisdom.
If there was light here, there could be light in other places. If there was power in me, I could spread it. I could let that power glow and make myself a beacon.
Nonie and Bix and Keller are great characters. I highly, highly recommend it. And it was completely weight-neutral-no description of anyone’s body size at all.
Reading While Fat 