All the Water in the World

I live near New York City and spend much of my childhood running around Central Park, climbing on the glacial rocks, looking at the statues and visiting The Central Park Zoo. I fondly look back at the hours spend wandering around the Met, MoMA, & American Museum of Natural History looking at the animal dioramas, sitting in the Planetarium or standing and staring in awe at the Blue Whale and dinosaurs. As I grew older I visited West Point, FDR's Estate and Park, the sculpture walks at Storm King, gawked at The Palisades and even visited Lee, Massachusetts. So, why is this list of my activities important to my review, this book literally took me on a road trip of myself and made me stare at the face of a world without these things and experiences, vividly and in detail. I saw a future where what is special to me was erased and forgotten due to global climate change and ocean level rise. You can tell this book's theme, narrative, and writing were amazing and hit too close to home for me. Now that, to me, is a book worth reading and owning. Although this is a world that is fictional, Nonie and her family live in a world this is all too possible today and one that becomes even more probable with every passing year. I felt as if my world was being, literally, washed away and a newer, unknown, and nightmarish one was emerging to take its place that I did not want to experience .

A good storyteller can share events that exist in their mind with a listener, but a great story teller puts you in the middle of a story and has you experience it with the characters. Eiren Caffall has done this with me -and thus the reason for my introduction to this review. This book, though written beautifully for a YA reader will resonate with anyone. This book left me stymied at several points because of the realness of it. It made me stop reading several times because I felt the bleakness of its present through the adults that once worked for the Museum that they are living in and their understanding of the altered world they exist in. I was transported back through the Hall of Plains Animal, to the Woodland People's exhibit to see the giant birch bark canoe, has he tearing up at the loss of the North Pacific People's Totem Poles rotting away; however, despite this all there was the hope that The Farm would be there to get them through it all and in Nonie and her sister I could see the fight to begin again. All is not lost despite the bleakness, humankind will move forward. And the Children of this New World will reclaim it with their grit, drive, and determination. This is a slow book, but one that used that pacing to transport me.

Power, beauty, vision, and hope all lie at the heart of this flooded landscape. I hope this book is viewed as speculative science fiction when it is looked back at in 100 years rather than as a missed Memo and warning. I hope we take a note of the question that is so often posed in this work today - "Didn't they know this coming? Couldn't they have done anything?" "

Thank you NetGalley and St Martin's Press for the ebook I read