All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall

Published by St. Martin's Press on January 7, 2025

Postapocalyptic fiction continues to be popular despite the formulaic nature of the genre. All the Water in the World imagines an environmental crisis caused by global warming. Unfortunately, that takes little imagination, given the prevailing American insistence that fossil fuel consumption is patriotic and that global warming isn’t a thing, or at least isn’t a thing that human behavior affects. Corporate America uses Fox News to tell the far right what they should believe and the far right dutifully joins every culture war — whether a nonexistent war against Christmas or the notion that alternatives to fossil fuels are bad for America — without giving any thought to the consequences of their victories.

The novel begins with a family and a few others living on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The adults were museum employees who remain dedicated to preserving knowledge, but violent storms are making it impossible for humans to survive in Manhattan. How deer have managed to overtake Central Park without drowning like humans is a bit of a mystery.

The central characters are sisters. Norah, the narrator, likes to be called Nonie. She’s thirteen. Her sister Beatrice likes to be called Bix. She’s sixteen. Their mother has a bad kidney and, since hospitals no longer function and pharmacies have all been raided, everyone knows she’s going to die. Their father and the other important character, a Black guy named Keller, manage to salvage a Native American canoe from the museum just before the building collapses. They will use the canoe to begin a journey.

Journeys — the quest to find a safe place where life can be remade — are standard plot drivers in post-apocalyptic fiction. The protagonists hatch a plan to take the boat up the Hudson and then walk along highways until they reach a farm where Nonie’s mother grew up. Along the way, they will encounter and overcome obstacles, including infections and a group of bad guys who want to rape Bix. After two of the travelers contract dangerous infections, the protagonists manage to find a doctor, but she’s in a community controlled by a selfish a-hole who believes that medical care and antibiotics should be reserved for community members. The a-hole doesn’t want new people to join the community unless they can work and contribute, which doesn’t describe people who need to heal.

Postapocalyptic fiction often divides survivors of the apocalypse into groups of good people and bad people, the bad people consisting of rapists, thugs, racists, and dictator wannabes, the good being those who resist subjugation. The good are open to helping others; the bad are not. Well, that’s how preapocalyptic society works, so it makes sense that an apocalypse would only enhance division, selfishness, and delusions of entitlement. Better examples of the genre make clear that the dividing line between good and bad can be fuzzy when people fight for survival, but Eiren Caffall doesn't trouble the reader with subtle thought.

There is nothing particularly interesting, or credible, about the journey that the protagonists undertake. One of the kids turns out to be handy with a gun, but how she managed to capture the gun from grown men is never made clear. A character or two will die during the trek because that’s what the formula demands, but the story creates little tension regarding the fate of the resilient sisters. Caffall does, however, offer a convincing atmosphere as she depicts the dangers inherent in global warming, including flooding and mosquito-borne illnesses.

Perhaps with a view to giving the narrator a personality, Nonie has an affinity for water. The parameters of this superpower are unclear, except that Nonie knows when storms are coming. She keeps a water logbook to record her impressions of the water. Her entries are silly and pointless.

Flashbacks to the preapocalyptic world slow the novel’s pace, as do the intermittent entries from Nonie’s logbook of water. The story otherwise proceeds swiftly to its predictable conclusion. Genre fans who just can’t get enough postapocalyptic fiction might want to add All the Water in the World to their reading lists, but nothing about the novel causes it to stand apart from other formulaic depictions of post-apocalyptic struggles for survival.

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