I didn’t expect to love this novel so much and here’s why: It has a 13-year-old narrator and I find that authors often struggle to capture just the right mix of knowing awareness and innocence in a character so young. It’s dystopian and I’ve just had my fill of zombies, floods and Mad Max rebirths.
And the writer, Eiren Caffall is a memoirist who turned to fiction. Sometimes that means an uneven first novel.
But I would have missed a magnificent book. “All the Water in the World” is remarkably imagined and deeply human as it carries us along with Nonnie, her sister Bix, her father and a friend as they escape a drowned New York in a canoe on a quest for safer, drier refuge.
There’s something of Lauren Groff’s “The Vaster Wilds” in this book in the way that the world feels new even as it is menacing and dangerous.
I’m confident you’ll be hearing about this book in your local library or bookstore or perhaps even on a screen some day. So read it now!
