All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall

 genre: climate fiction

What Nonie knows about the world is this: it has been ravaged by water.  As the floods have taken over the shorelines and the cities, Nonie, her older sister and her parents, have taken refuge in the upper floors of New York City's American Museum of Natural History.  On the rooftops they've made a home and a life out of preserving what can be preserved and keeping each other close.  But the storms are only getting bigger and one storm is so huge that staying is no longer an option - and over the water is the only choice.

I will freely admit that these kinds of post-apocalyptic stories are a sweet spot for me, so my views will be tainted by the fact that I love a story of survival on our planet that no longer looks familiar. That being said, this book leapt in a beautiful spaces I hadn't anticipated.  Not real spaces, but the spaces inside Nonie's mind, where she makes sense of what she's seeing and finds the courage to keep looking forward while gently cradling what's come before.  It's an adult story told from a unique young teen's point of view and so her uncertainty and need to cared for are always butting up against what is terrifying and what is required. Perhaps Nonie's on the spectrum, perhaps her way of seeing things has been so shaped by a hard-scrabble life that her emotions have shifted into a zone that keeps her feeling just safe enough to not give up - but her language and way of describing events just shimmered with beauty for me.  

It's slow moving but never too slow for me.  It's in familiar spaces on a familiar river and that imagined reality brought the terror of this situation so close to home.  It's heartbreaking, but not without redemption and light and the kind of hope that will be required from us if humankind will survive what happens to this planet if the disaster can no longer be averted.