BOOK REVIEW OF
All the Water in the World
Eiren Caffall
Reviewed by Ella Law (with Gemini & NotebookLM)
Updated December 28, 2025 | Published March 26, 2025
Table of Contents
Content Rating
🟡 CSR-3: Teen & YA – Contains Mature Themes
Read more about The Obsidian Library’s Content Rating Scale here.
⚠CW: ⚰ Death & Grief, 🧠 Mental Health, 🌎 Climate Collapse, 💊 Medical Crisis, 🐾 Animal Abandonment, 🚨 Sexual Assault (non-graphic), 🩸 Violence
✔ This novel is a hauntingly intimate look at climate collapse through the eyes of a young girl navigating the aftermath of societal breakdown. Includes graphic content, carrying substantial emotional and existential weight. Appropriate for older teens and adult readers.
📖 Introduction & Why This Book Matters
Eiren Caffall's All the Water in the World doesn't scream—it aches. It's a quiet novel, told in the soft voice of a child growing up after the world has ended, not with a bang, but a slow unraveling. Nonie (Nora), the daughter of two scientists, inhabits a world as it is.
What haunted me most wasn't the spectacle of destruction, but the whisper of dissolution—the world doesn't end with alarms blaring, but with silence settling where birdsong once lived. This book matters because it does something rare: it portrays the apocalypse not as spectacle, but as grief. Grief for lost seasons. Grief for music. Grief for futures that should've been. Grief that becomes so embedded in daily life it no longer needs a name.
✍️ Plot Summary
In a future where the rising Atlantic has turned New York City into a memory, the American Museum of Natural History is no longer a monument to the past—it is "Amen," a rooftop sanctuary for a found family surviving the end of the world. For Nonie, a teenager with an uncanny ability to sense the shifting moods of the weather, this fragile safety is all she knows. She lives alongside her fierce sister Bix, their scientist parents, and a small community who view their survival as a curatorial duty to the future, preserving the "World As It Was" in logbooks against the rising tides.
But even Amen cannot hold back the "Monster in the Water" forever. When a catastrophic hypercane destroys their refuge, Nonie and her family are forced into the unknown. With only a fragile birchbark canoe scavenged from the Hall of Eastern Woodlands, they must navigate the treacherous, flooded Hudson River toward a rumored safe haven in the Berkshire hills.
The journey north is a perilous test of endurance against a landscape transformed by climate collapse. From the ghostly, submerged ruins of Bannerman’s Island to the deceptive order of settlements ruled by debt and guns, the family must confront not only the elements but the "Lost" people who roam the waters. All the Water in the World is a haunting, lyrical exploration of grief and resilience. It is not a story of loud explosions, but of the quiet, aching struggle to keep love alive when the world falls apart. Eiren Caffall weaves a tale that asks: when the floodwaters rise, who do we become, and what are we willing to carry to the other side?
💡 Key Takeaways & Insights
Collapse Doesn't Always Roar—Sometimes It Whispers Through conversations between broken adults, we learn: the data was there. The warnings were loud. The storms came, and people chose denial. "It was easy to see," someone says, about the collapse. But they didn't want to believe. What stays with you isn't the drama of catastrophe, but the quiet erosion of normalcy—one storm at a time. This subtle decay mirrors our own real-life patterns of denial and detachment.
The Deepest Love Is Often the Quietest The relationships between children and their caretakers are central to this story, particularly the bond between Nonie and her fierce, flawed protectors. These men and women didn't save the world. They saved a child. In a broken world, that act feels revolutionary. Survival isn't dramatized; it's normalized. A hypercane took their brownstone. Dogs now roam in packs. The President is rumored to be on a boat somewhere. Everyone else simply endures—and loves fiercely in the spaces between.
Grief and Tenderness Can Coexist This book leaves you not devastated, but aching. It's a slow-simmer sorrow—grief braided with quiet moments of care. Caffall never forces catharsis; instead, she lets grief live in the background, ever-present but never sensationalized. That makes it feel real. Lyrical. Honest. The love in this book is quietly radical. Parents no longer expect to survive, so they raise their children as a village. Angel teaches Nonie and Bix how to forage, to heal, to learn. Jess fiercely watches over the children. Mary keeps her promise to be a helper even when it costs her dearly.
The Natural World Isn't Separate—It's a Relative We've Neglected Through Nonie's eyes, we're invited to rethink our relationship to nature—not as something to protect out of guilt or fear, but as something familial. Something precious. The characters' reverence for water, weather, plant medicine—it feels like a call to remember our place within the ecosystem, not above it. Nonie is old enough to understand what's happening, but still young enough to dream. Her pain comes in small, precise sentences. Like when she says she hid her wanting, because she thought wanting was greed. Or when she realizes she made her dad feel alone, even when she was right there.
Caregiving Is a Revolutionary Act Angel and Mary leave their imprint—not just because of what they did, but how they did it. Angel, preparing the children for a world without her. Mary, risking everything to be a helper. In their quiet resistance, their nurturing, their unglamorous courage—we see a kind of heroism the world often overlooks. The "water log book," filled with fragments of memory, becomes both prophecy and preservation. Through it, we learn that the apocalypse doesn't erase meaning—it sharpens it. In a world where everything is lost, people become the only home that matters.
🤯 The Most Interesting or Unexpected Part
The moment at the American Natural History Museum, when Nonie sees a photo of a longhouse and says it looks nice, and her dad says, "I wish I could give you that." That single line contains everything: the loss, the love, the impossible weight of parenthood in a dying world. They could have had it. And you feel it like a knife.
🏛️ How This Book Applies to Real Life
This is a book for people wondering how to live in a world that feels like it's ending. It doesn't offer answers—it bears witness. And maybe that's enough.
Who should read All the Water in the World?
Parents wondering what it means to protect children in uncertain times.
Readers looking for a slower, more poetic take on dystopia.
Anyone who's ever felt the urge to mourn things before they're gone.
Those seeking to understand how grief and tenderness can occupy the same space.
📚 Final Rating: 4.8 / 5
🎯 Should you read it? Yes, especially if you're emotionally brave and craving something beautifully sad. I loved this book for the way it depicts the heart-breaking reality of raising children in a fracturing, dangerous world, and the bravery, compassion, and generosity it takes to survive it.
🔥 Final Thought: All the Water in the World doesn't demand your attention; it gently asks for your heart, then breaks it. It's not loud or flashy, but it will sit with you long after you finish, whispering reminders of what we've lost, and what we still have, if we choose to care for it. In a literary landscape often dominated by apocalyptic spectacle, this quiet meditation on collapse, grief, and the revolutionary power of caregiving offers something far more precious: a blueprint for how to love in the midst of loss.