All the Water in the World

“The Museum Logbook was to keep understanding alive, the most important work there was for Amen, a race against rot and mold and time to save things, even the memory of things. My Water Logbook was only for the future. I was young then and didn’t know why I was making it. Now I know it was to make the new way of knowing that might put it all right again, the new thing I’m standing at the edge of, here where there is drinkable water and where people are in the rooms of the house writing and cooking, and I’m about to leave again, but only for good reasons, remembering what was left behind in that storm.”

This passage presents a central internal conflict both for Nonie and for some of the settlements: the prioritization of preserving the past over preparing for the future. Nonie’s mother inspires the Amen community members, including Nonie, to all record their findings and preserve cultural artifacts in hopes of carrying knowledge of their past into the future. They value where they came from and fear their history being lost. However, this comes at the expense of their future. The hypercane wipes out their settlement, and only Father has the relevant skills and Nonie the confidence to get each other, Keller, and Bix safely out of the museum. Nonie acknowledges here that they left some things behind, physically and emotionally; while she remembers them, she would rather forge ahead to build something new than try to recreate the past.

“We were like the people in Leningrad, Father said, in the War, the Second one, when the Hermitage, a museum bigger than ours even, was left for dead in a dying city but the curators stayed. There wasn’t much left, but […] the curators stayed and ate restorer paste to stay alive and wrapped the dead and laid them in the basement until the thaw and chipped the ice off the paintings while the siege went on outside. All that mattered was that the art remained. Even if they could have run away across Lake Ladoga and into the edges of the taiga forest and hidden […] they wouldn’t have left. They belonged to the art and the art belonged to them and it was a sacred duty. But so was the vision of what it would be one day when the siege was over and the windows replaced and the broken walls repaired and the museum alive again […].

That was us. Only the siege was storms. We stayed because we had to, because Bix was too terrified of the water to go, but we also stayed because it was the work, Mother’s and Father’s work, the reason they met, the work of keeping what was left until the world was ready again.”

The Hermitage, a Russian museum, is a major motif throughout the novel, indicating the motives of her parents and the other Amen community members. They place the utmost importance on preserving their work, even at the expense of their own health and safety. While they see this as a noble goal, the novel presents it as somewhat shortsighted. Art represents culture and, more broadly, the people who create it; valuing the preservation of art over people misses the point of what cultural artifacts represent. They say they’re doing it for whoever comes in the “future,” but that future can’t exist if people don’t exist. This aligns with The Importance of Building a Future, a theme that deeply connects to Nonie’s character arc. Nonetheless, Nonie’s parents dedicated their lives to preserving cultural and historical artifacts, and Nonie respects that reverence.

“Bix was contradictory—bold and terrified, full of action and stuck. She liked to disappear in her own way, from the water after she got scared, into dark corners, into Mother’s vinyl record of Bix Beiderbecke on Tenth Street. It was jazz, had a cover with a picture—the horn player in a bow tie. Bix loved the solos, the lilt, the ease. The music had something of the way things had been long before we were born, optimism. It matched her. ‘Before the crash,’ Bix said, when electric was new and Old City was smaller and brighter, like a fresh-cut jewel, and cars made their way into the music and everything. Bix made sure she kept a piece of that time in her mouth with her name. She wanted it in all our mouths, made sure no one called her Beatrice. Made sure no one called me Norah. Like Father, she was impulsive.”

This passage illustrates Bix’s preoccupation with the past, which affects her to a harmful degree. Like the Amen researchers, she greatly admires the culture of society before the climate disaster; however, this perspective defines her entire personality. Changing her name shows how she wants to bring back the past so dearly that she’d build her identity around it. This receives further emphasis through Bix’s backstory: She nearly lost her life in the original New York flood. She sees the future, which is represented by the water, as terrifying, something to avoid. In this way, she acts as a foil to Nonie, who is in tune with the water and is thus more prepared to face the future, partly because she can’t remember the old world.

“I started talking again a year after we came to Amen, but I didn’t talk like everybody—I said full sentences mixed up with silence and science and the formal books Mother read us at night, Verne and Stevenson, little professor. […] Bix and Mother and Father all said my brain wasn’t wired like other people’s. I could sit with Mother in the lab for hours. I could organize all the plastic sea-creature toys in my room, so they lined the windowsills. I could remember all the animals in the museum, even without the Logbook. I didn’t understand how Bix felt sometimes, or Father or Mother. I had to watch their faces and think about what they meant when they spoke. I had to do that with everyone. Keller and I could talk about animals. [The] game about animals […] made me settled and calm when we played, asking my brain to shush and concentrate and remember.”

This passage heavily implies that Nonie is neurodivergent. While her family and others would understand the terms for autism and other forms of neurodivergence, leaving Nonie’s traits uncategorized—refusing to name them—introduces the idea that they might not need names in “The World As It Is.” Instead of being a disability, her sensitivity to all forms of water is a near-superpower in this new environment. This explores Caffall’s idea that neurodivergence isn’t inherently a limitation; rather, current society just isn’t built to accommodate neurodivergent people. The reference to Animal in Mind shows that her community is supportive, however. The passage establishes that Nonie has supportive and thoughtful people around her who notice and appreciate her rather othering her or trying to change her.

“Things fell in slow motion. Rolling blackouts, waves of refugees heading north and west, army everywhere, gas rationed, food scarce, the president in a huge ship offshore. In Old City they built floodgates that kept the sea outside, blocked the ocean getting up the river, made the city an island we lived inside, a bowl that flooded up from the sewers when the storms came. […] Every year the storms were bigger—moving the ocean up into the streets. But there was electricity sometimes, there were people in the city, none of us ever imagined Amen. There were jobs and grocery stores. We had a ration card, we drove places, and you could just take a car out on the road like that, like it was nothing.”

Nonie details the descent of society amid the encroaching impacts of climate change, which the novel implies are like the changes happening in the modern day. Nonie notes how people “before” took their luxuries and safety for granted, ignoring the worsening weather until it became too dangerous. Her focus on seemingly mundane things like driving cars implies that people should value these privileges more and, most importantly, minimize their use of them, and better protect the rest of everyday life before it’s too late. The words “slow motion” offer a more explicit responsibility: Things aren’t changing too quickly to respond, so everyone should move quickly in the time they have to enact change.

“I saw over Father’s shoulder, up the street canyon, a high wave on top of the waves already there, a leapfrog wave, taller, faster, the way they get in a tide surge.

Mother and Bix came out the door of Tenth Street straight into the flood, they ran to us, didn’t see the building wave behind them. It moved so fast that they were caught and lost under the roll of it—Bix’s hand sucked from Mother’s hand as both submerged. […]

He […] dove into the water, pulled Bix out, put her on his hip, grabbed Mother’s hand, ran back to me. On the wet stone of the stoop, he pushed the flood out of Bix’s lungs, Mother sobbing and crying. The look in Bix’s eyes when she came to was death whispering at her back. We […] watched the tide below us throwing around bicycles and flower buckets. Father held me and curled into Mother and Bix, all of us in a wet, embracing pile together.”

This passage emphasizes both the importance of Nonie’s family’s bond and the fear that motivates Bix throughout the novel. It depicts Nonie’s father as impulsive and brave, a parent who loves his daughter so much that he dives without hesitation into a life-threatening wave to pull her to safety. This familial support bolsters Nonie and helps reinforce the grief she feels when she eventually loses both parents. For Bix, the transition into “The World As It Is” is one of mortal fear. She struggles to value the love and connection she has in the new world because “death whisper[s] at her back.” This exemplifies the two primary ways in which people react to the crisis—reaching out to others or turning inward in fear—and touches on the theme of The Social and Emotional Impacts of Climate Change.

“There were so many new kinds of storms, so many new kinds of water after we came to Amen: a hurricane that took all the trees in our garden, a tornado that dropped a ring of dead deer in the Park, a nor’easter that sent sideways rain, a flood that came up from the subways and sewers and kept us inside for three days, a wind that dumped all the water caches and flooded the roof.

I could feel water then, even from the beginning, like you can feel sweat on your skin. When a rain came and it was clear that […] the basement of Amen would be flooded, I could sense it like the prickle of sweat coming up on the back of my neck. I could feel […] evil things, chemicals leaching, or the stink of corpses, or rats who were quick enough to swim with the rising tide. I could feel when the water coming was good. Sweet rain showers would roll through […] as they made their way over Jersey. […] We’d stand in the bright downpours and dance, an old pickle tub at our feet catching fresh water to drink […] while the rain pooled on the stones that lined the roof, slicking them down, the sunlight coming in from under the clouds, caught so everything was alive.”

Nonie’s connection to water is an essential plot device and character trait. She doesn’t remember much of the world before the floods; the new world is the society she understands. Additionally, her sensory sensitivity perfectly attunes her to an environment ruled by water. Whereas neurodivergence would have been considered a disability in the world before, it’s now a crucial tool in navigating the world. By contrast, others who don’t see and feel things as she does are far less able to adapt. The memory of dancing with her mother in the rain shows how, despite the climate disaster and the dangers of water, she sees the goodness in it. In addition, it connects her to her mother, who encourages her interest in studying and tracking it.

“‘[The Sally Ride] was the ship I went on a long time ago, when I was in grad school, before Woods Hole. The government […] made a fleet of ships to study […] the ocean and told them to stay out there. I knew some people that went. I didn’t go because Bix was on the way.’

‘They’re sailing out there?’ I thought of the picture of the woman in the bathysphere […], her face framed in the hatch of the sub, looking out like she just discovered joy.

‘I like to think that they are. Maybe they made it when all of this came apart.’ She was quiet, eyes closed […]. Faith like an ocean […].

‘Me too. I like to think so, too.’ And I let faith into me as if the ocean were the whole healing secret to The World As It Is.

‘If things ever get back on track, […] Nonie, I bet you’ll be a scientist, a studier of the bits of things that end up telling a kind of awful and beautiful truth. You can feel the truth of small things in your bones, like you can feel all the weight of water. And it will take someone like you to heal it up.’

She opened her eyes and looked at me, and I knew she was willing the ocean to fill my veins with a tide of hope.”

This exchange between Nonie and her mother helps thematically develop the importance of building a future. The Sally Ride is an important symbol, representing both hope for all and Nonie’s personal desire to learn more about the world. Whereas Bix is like her father, Nonie is like her mother, and both embrace the changes of the new world even as they mourn the old one. Mother deeply valued oceanic research and understood that attuning oneself to the ways of water was essential to adapt to their new environment. It offers a means of building a future, thus creating hope amid despair. Bix struggles to understand this due to her fear of water. The Sally Ride, in contrast, offers Nonie something to strive for, both a personal goal and a belief that society may not have fully crumbled.

“Leaving Amen was walking away from the side of a grave. The person wasn’t there, only the body under the soil. Bodies of people we love die, we leave them. Something of them remains in us, something we have to keep like we would a fossil, a story no one remembers, a Logbook. I knew that a place is just a body, no longer alive without the people that ensoul it, but it still hurt to go. There were four of us that the loss of Amen didn’t take. […] I had to concentrate on us to stay awake, to not throw up, to stop shaking, not worry about Mother’s grave left behind below the waves. I had to listen to Mother’s voice in my head, ‘Breathe, baby.’ I had to love us. I had to love what was in the boat. I had to love the breath filling Father and Bix and Keller and me as we left Amen.”

Nonie’s description of fossilized memories parallels the cultural preservation efforts of the members of the Amen community. Death is a natural part of life but is far more common as the apocalyptic climate disaster sweeps the world, and the natural instinct is to cling to what is or may be lost. The uncertainty surrounding safety, wondering what the next day will bring, contributes to thematically developing the social and emotional impacts of climate change. Nonie must compartmentalize her feelings about her mother’s grave and the bodies in her settlement that they’re leaving behind, in order to forge ahead with her family. She focuses more heavily on the importance of Father, Keller, and Bix to her as a means of coping with what she has lost, and this gives her the strength to keep going.

“I asked Keller why he chose bugs and not God. He laughed, shook his head, brushed ash from his hands, scratched the beard growing in on his soft jawline. ‘I have everything of the infinite in insects, Nonie. Do you know how many there are?’

‘No. How many?’

‘Nine hundred thousand kinds named, little warrior, maybe thirty million unidentified. In The World As It Was, we thought there were maybe ten quintillion individual insects alive on the planet. With this weather, even factoring in the extinctions, I’m sure there are lots more than that.’ He laughed. ‘Largest biomass there is on the earth.’ He had pride in his voice. He worked on something The World As It Is couldn’t kill.”

Keller’s words offer appreciation for the various forms of life on Earth and also hope by showing that the climate disaster can’t and won’t take everything. While many species would have been tragically lost—nearly including humans—many life forms in the world are quite capable of surviving. Keller admires the resilience of insects and clings to this to emotionally support himself, knowing that not everything he loved was lost. Finding something to admire about the world is often the only way to cope with their difficult circumstances. In addition, this suggests that humans may not be the most important or powerful creatures on Earth. While humans ruled the world before and contributed to the ecological downfall, they aren’t the ones to come out on top.

“‘Look at us—thinkers forced to be makers against our will.’

‘Only thing your degree got you was a house that white people shouldn’t build.’

‘That’s what Deirdre is always telling me.’

Mother teased Father. ‘Appropriator,’ she called him, told him he’d copied the Haudenosaunee with his longhouse. He worked at the Met, a curator of early American architecture. He was a city child playing pioneer, knife in his pack, the knowledge of making fire from flint […]. He understood what was wrong with building Indigenous things.

‘It’s hard though, they built things that work. Hard not to borrow.’ He’d worked […] to give back what museums took from the people who owned the land […]. ‘Imperialism at its finest,’ he said about the longhouse, ‘or its worst. White people can’t stop stealing good ideas, even when the empire’s gone.’”

This conversation introduces some of the complications of cultural heritage and exchange. Much of the US history that the AMNH protects is what European colonists stole from Indigenous peoples after brutally oppressing them. The novel depicts Indigenous Americans as people who better understood the value of respecting nature; in contrast, modern Western society disrespected the environment and caused the climate crisis. Had they had taken to heart the values of the people who came before them, rather than preserving only what they deemed important, they might have avoided many of the disastrous consequences. This adds facets to the novel’s thematic concern with The Importance of Preserving Knowledge and Culture.

“Greed could shutter a person. I’d seen it when Sean stopped eating after Jim died from the Mosquito Borne, when he stopped working, and when he disappeared, only to turn up dead on the grass the next morning. In the library, during a history lesson to go with Moby Dick, Angel read to us about when the world ran its greed on whale oil, showed us pictures of men standing in heaps of whale flesh on a boat deck, sheets of fat half hanging into huge boiling pots to make oil to make lamps. The men looked certain of everything. Douglas looked that way, greedy of his light and his notebooks, of his building and systems.

But greed like that didn’t start out bad. What alters wanting is what’s behind it. Greed and hope aren’t opposites. Greed and hope are twins grabbing for the same thing, one in fear and one in faith.”

This passage points out the thoughtless greed, killing of animals, and destruction of the natural environment that led to the climate disaster. However, it offers a form of sympathy to existing settlements. The way that some people of the old world operated disturbs Nonie. While the practice of using whales to create oil is outdated even to Caffall’s audience, many modern practices are equally irresponsible and destructive. This sort of greed was what Nonie might consider a negative “want,” since it satisfied only a desire for money. Another way that some of the settlements gain resources and labor is through manipulation or violence. Their actions are equally wrong, but their motivations stem from a more sympathetic desire for the stability and security they once had. The greedy worry that they won’t get what they want, so they grab first; however, more hopeful people like Nonie and those of the Cloisters believe that the planet can support everyone if people collaborate and more thoughtfully approach gathering and distributing resources.

“The sound of wolves in the distance woke me. It was dawn. Under the lean-to, pale sky showed between the sticks above my head where a poncho flapped free, Father and Bix asleep beside me. I gauged the distance to the wolves from their sound. They were with us on the ridge, trapped on our Palisades Island. Their voices echoed off the forest, not off the water. I counted the minutes between, like counting between lightning and thunder. Canis lupus lupus. They didn’t scare me like dogs—house creatures gone crazy in the empty streets. Wolves were meant for a forest. They didn’t want humans. They wanted deer. I didn’t want them close, but I didn’t want them gone.”

Nonie reveals her close understanding of animals here: She can distinguish wolves from dogs and recall their scientific names. She places special importance on distinguishing between natural and unnatural threats, contrasting with what may be a natural instinct to eliminate predators. She doesn’t want the wolves to die or disappear solely because they could harm her; she understands their importance in the natural world and wants them to return to safety. This shows that Nonie identifies with animals in a way, because they have evolved specifically to suit a certain environment and yearn to freely run to it just as Nonie aspires to join the Sally Ride and research what she considers her natural environment: the ocean.

“She stepped away from Mano, toward the dogs. He followed her instead, reaching to pull her back as she was pulled, magnet-like, toward the thing that could kill her.

I started climbing the tree. ‘Bix! Mano! Get up here!’

Bix’s head whipped around. I could see Mano say something to her […] I couldn’t hear, and then she seemed to shake out of a trance, look at the dogs and finally see them, then turn and take off running to my tree.

‘Mano!’ she screamed as she ran.

Mano stood still, looked back to her, didn’t run. Then he turned, aimed his bow, and held his shot tight on the pack in case it went for Bix. The lead dog ran for her, passed Mano as it sprinted after Bix, he turned and shot it. He tried to get another arrow set. A second dog jumped at Mano as he notched that arrow. His shot missed. Mano was caught by the dog, and I could hear him screaming, the pack arriving, the sound of it.”

This flashback to when dogs killed Bix’s boyfriend and Keller’s nephew, Mano, is a crucial moment of character background for Bix. The gruesome scene and the grief of losing him traumatized Nonie, but Bix was personally responsible and carries this with her. Much like the scene wherein she nearly drowned, Bix seems to have a closeness with death, something in opposition to Nonie’s affinity to water and life. Bix was entranced by the wild dogs, who weren’t meant to be in this environment and subsequently went feral. Similarly, Bix feels she doesn’t belong in this world and lives in fear, constantly feeling on the brink of death. This parallel between her and the dogs endangered others, however, because she didn’t adapt and react appropriately to the situation. Bix’s guilt over Mano’s death motivates her character and compels her to save her father when two men attack them.

“‘What do you think it is like out there?’ I asked Jess. It was sunset, and we were […] looking out over the view to the towers to the west. It was hot and we were moving the water from the rain collectors into jugs. Jess walked away from me, came back with a milk crate, four empty jugs inside.

‘On the ocean?’ she asked.

‘On the ocean.’

‘On the Sally Ride? The research ship?’

‘The ship, the fleet. Do you think the fleet is still out there?’

‘I think so,’ she said. ‘I mean, I hope so. I had friends out there. They signed on for a long-term mission, you know.’”

Nonie fixates on the Sally Ride because it embodies everything she wants from her future and symbolizes the mere idea of a future in the first place. It represents the idea that some living things can survive disaster and prepare for a life afterward rather than spiraling toward an inevitable end. As such, Nonie asks about the ship often, fixating on it, and others react positively, though Jess’s response sounds as if she partly humoring Nonie. This exchange thematically highlights the importance of building a future because the hope that the Sally Ride continues to perform research and increase humanity’s chances of survival is the emotional bolster that Nonie needs to keep moving.

“The sun was setting, the woods already shadowed. It hadn’t rained all day, and I’d never looked at the sky. We were silent. Then Bix sang. She hadn’t sung since Amen. I forgot how her voice was. It was Mother’s, deep and scratchy.

I am a poor wayfaring stranger

I’m traveling through this world of woe

Yet there’s no sickness, toil, nor danger

In that bright land to which I go

I’m going there to see my Father

I’m going there, no more to roam

I’m only going over Jordan

I’m only going over home

That was a Mother song, one she kept for bedtime. I hated it when I was small. Bix told me when we first came to Amen, I wouldn’t let Mother sing it. The lyric hurt my heart, the loneliness crawled in and bruised it. But on Storm King Mountain my heart was already broken, and the song didn’t hurt.”

Bix’s song underscores the importance of memory, a subtheme that runs throughout the novel. Amen and other settlements are trying to preserve the culture of the old world, but spoken or sung stories is the oldest form of cultural preservation in existence. The song help the sisters remember their mother and show that they’re beginning to process their grief in a healthy way. The song is “Wayfaring Stranger,” an old folk tune, and Nonie’s acceptance of its bittersweet nature demonstrates that she’s maturing, accepting the pain in her life, and embracing her memories despite how they may hurt.

“At Amen we used rocks to mark where someone was buried. It showed the place, not the name. The only one different was Mano’s—it had a cross. Angel roped together two-by-fours, carved them with a tool she found in a curator’s lab. She worked all day on the roof. ‘Papi would know if I didn’t do this,’ she told me. ‘Papi would know.’ Her hair untucked from her bun, the curls waved in the humid air like fern fronds. She was beautiful in the haze, her cheeks pink, sweat on her upper lip, sawdust on her dark eyebrows from carving: Manolito Rivera. Loved boy.”

Like the previous quote, this one depicts the beauty in grief, as the actions they take when grieving are a means of expressing love for someone no longer there. Angel believed that Mano deserved better than a simple rock: In keeping with religious tradition, and to honor her father, she ensured that Mano received the closest thing she could offer to a Christian burial. This isn’t necessarily because she’s a heavily religious person but more likely because this is what’s done in her family, and to offer it to Mano is to reaffirm his status as a beloved member of her family.

“‘We haven’t seen any strangers all summer, or any Blacks since the refugee wave. Our tower is the highest point around. I saw you coming up the river today.’ She paused. ‘It’s extra work protecting a Black man. One traveling with children?’ Her voice caught when she said ‘children.’ ‘Jared hates extra work.’”

Despite Poppy’s sympathetic decision to take Bix, Nonie, and Keller in, her comments create a feeling of hostility and unease. Encountering racism was a key worry of Keller’s, since racism has become even more rampant amid some of the settlements. He doesn’t sense that Poppy others him, but her words contain a warning about Jared, whose attitude differs. He sees Black people as “extra work,” which really means that he flagrantly discriminates against them and endangers them, so Poppy is hesitant to bring them in. This is another way that the new world and the old share many social ills, but these ills often intensify amid the acute insecurity and lawlessness of postapocalyptic society.

“She hesitated. ‘The Camp was there a long time, in The World As It Was when we took in people from the Maldives, from Syria, Turkey, the Caribbean. It was the holding spot—Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Haitians—but then the military tightened it. They rationed the food and the medicine. The town would raid it for supplies, they never liked having refugees up here. They burned part of it to the ground, killed a lot of people. […] Finally, the army fell apart, the townspeople came in, there was a massacre. The raiding parties left for the hills. Hancock took the leftover stuff, the ammo and medicine. Like they were waiting for the end of things. […] Hancock has ways of keeping order that I don’t like.’

Everything sounded different from Amen: armies, camps, settlements. She was describing so many places made without care. Amen, the Cloisters even, were made entirely around love.”

Nonie reckons with lifestyles opposite to her own. She associates everyone with history and knowledge, since she was raised in a unique, isolated community, but she must now mature and recognize the dangers she may have to face in her new life. In addition, this exchange points out a recognizable trend, wherein people blame refugees or immigrants for a country’s lack of resources; in response, people attack the immigrants rather than seeking more support. The people the text mentions were massacred came from countries in which most of the population is nonwhite, which relates to the broader racism that worries Keller.

“‘You don’t carry a gun?’ I asked Mary.

‘No. Never. Just a knife, and only because I was told to.’

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t like ‘em.’

‘That’s it?’

Mary walked in silence for long enough I wasn’t sure she heard me. ‘I made a pledge. I promised not to do any harm, to always be a helper to human beings. I don’t want things to have gotten so bad that I have to go back on a promise I made.’”

In contrast to characters who are forced to kill for others’ safety, like Bix, Esther, and Darling, Mary is determined not to do so. She recognizes the limitations this introduces to life in a dangerous world, but she’s mature enough to develop a thoughtful code of conduct relating to her profession and live by it. This gives Nonie a glimmer of hope by reaffirming that she doesn’t necessarily need to be violent to survive and doesn’t have to turn into someone she doesn’t want to be.

“‘Why do you think I was in the goddamned army?’

‘Why?’

‘I’m Mohawk, Kanien’keha: ka. Half the kids from my town went into the army. It’s how we got to college. That’s how we got back any power at all. I wanted to learn medicine. I did all of it to help.’ She took out a bandana from her pocket and wiped her forehead. ‘Nonie, you idiot, can’t you tell who to trust? Jared kept me because I’m a medic. He needs me.’ She pulled the paracord around Bix, tied a knot, straightened. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’m not going back.’”

Mary calls out the same racism that Keller experiences, but she adds a new layer to it: People contradict their own prejudice if they need something. Mary found this dehumanizing but she needed a place to live; nevertheless, she has moved on and is prepared to firmly leave Jared behind. In addition, she touches on aspects of “The World As It Was” by discussing the socioeconomic issues impacting Indigenous American people, including a slew of unique and difficult barriers. This relates to the novel’s overall discussion about the importance of honoring Indigenous American knowledge, history, and culture. The very society that colonizers tried to eradicate and that saved Nonie and her family’s life (through the canoe) is a society that lacks access to the privileges that others enjoy.

“‘Well, the thing is that men can use sex to hurt people.’

‘They can?’

‘Yeah, they can be bigger and use their weight […] and a kind of broken desire to force people into sex. And if that ever happens to you, you have to tell me. Even if it is someone here, someone you know. Sex should never feel bad like that. And people can use their love like that too, […] to make you feel hurt and scared. We have to watch out for that from strangers and from people who look safe. OK? You understand me?’ I could feel Bix nodding in the bunk. ‘You might have to help Norah remember this, or someone else, OK? You have to know the difference between the safe and not safe when someone loves you.’

I could feel the broken love, broken way of treating people pouring off Childs.”

The novel emphasizes that threats to marginalized groups, including women, still exist in “The World As It Is,” but they’re artifacts of the old world in their own right. Rather than treating them as actions people might take out of desperation, the novel depicts them specifically as preexisting beliefs that harmful people carried into the new world, beliefs that aren’t conducive to building a functioning society. Childs is an exploitative and dangerous person who, like the two men who kidnap Bix, introduces Nonie to a difficult truth about the dynamic between men and women. This shows that, though still quite young, Nonie is slowly coming of age; she must mature in order to prepare for all the dangers of the world.

“It was ours, the water at the farm, but it was no different from any other water, every drop of moisture that fell since there were only protozoa, trilobites, orthicons. It was inside every single human being. When I missed the sea, I could lean my face into another person—with worry or dangerous joy or grieving—and feel their tide. The World As It Is is only a furious tide of people, linked by blood and tears and sweat, a push toward each other we can’t stem. Water was over Mother’s grave, beside Father’s, under the boats, in my blood and the blood of everyone I loved.

I felt it all. I felt the weight of all the water in the world.

I turned to Bix. ‘Let’s get inside,’ I said. ‘It’s going to rain.’”

This passage summarizes the importance of water to Nonie. Her attunement to water is a useful plot device, guiding her settlement and later her small group of survivors through dangerous situations, but this elevates her affinity to something more than a survival skill. Instead, it symbolizes the bond between all people, something that they sacrifice in the acts of greed and destruction that led to the climate crisis. Nonie recognizes and values the connection among all people, animals, and environments. The novel presents this mindset as the ideal way to think in order to heal nature and build a better future.