Ayoung girl documents her escape from a flooded and now uninhabitable New York City.
After the progressive decline of the World As It Was—“Storms always came. They took things”—13-year-old Nonie is adjusting to life in what remains of New York, most of the city and its people now gone. Nonie is part of a group of survivors living in a community called Amen in the remnants of the American Museum of Natural History; she handles the routine and confines of life in
The World As It Is better than most, as she remembers little of the world’s past freedoms and safety. She also feels a deep connection with the water, so much so that she can sense incoming storms—all except one, the hypercane, a storm that “moved faster than thought and faster than sense.” This finally forces the group to abandon the relative safety of Amen and the purpose they’ve found in documenting the artifacts of the museum as “a duty to the future.”
The narrative keeps pace with the sense of urgency created by the hypercane, and Caffall brings the terrifying realities of this near-future to vivid life through expert use of sensory language: “We moved blind and clattering through dark halls, along the balcony of African animals, past the elephants. Only the tip of a single trunk visible above the flood.
The stairs were wet…rain pouring in to meet the sea, the slippery marble hard to manage, the sound of breaking glass.” Nonie’s unique account of the survivors’ journey north along the Hudson River—she has both a scientific mind and a sense of wonder—is a celebration of human perseverance at the hands of nature’s awe-inspiring power.
