Global warming and rising waters push people to live on ships — can they survive?
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After the Flood by Kassandra Montag
Content warnings included in the footnote of this newsletter.1
What It’s About
Only about 100 years in the future, the world looks very different than it does now. Global warming, with its slow and almost unnoticeable daily changes, eventually led to rising floodwaters, which overtook most coastal cities and countries, leaving very little land left for humans to live on. The world is sparse mountaintop colonies and vast, vast waters.
Myra and her young daughter Pearl have been fending for themselves for years, living on their small boat and making do with the supplies they have, bartering for the rest. Myra’s oldest daughter, Row, has been missing since her father stole her away from the family and took off, and Myra has been reeling ever since.
When she hears that Row may be in an encampment north near the Arctic Circle, she and Pearl set off to find her — even if all the odds are stacked against them. Along the way, she must trust strangers she meets and hopes they will help her get to their final destination, but it will be a perilous journey the whole way.
Why You Should Read It
The front half of this book may be slower in plot than you’re used to, but I urge you to keep going. It sets up what the Six-Year Flood was (global warming, resulting in waters overtaking much of the existing land as we know it) and how people adapted. The book is largely set afterward, after people had established new bartering systems and many people had taken to the seas. It felt a while before the story itself picked up, but when it did, that’s when I truly fell into the atmosphere and the writing.
Myra’s struggle to do right by both her daughters was the heart of the book, and her pull to keep both of them safe was what made her character strong. Montag's writing is compelling and captivating as she details Myra’s internal and external journeys.
After literal years of following
and hoping there would be an event in my area, there finally was! I took my shiny new copy of The Book of Love (provided free from the publisher, thank you!) and sat in a bar with other book nerds, read my book, and enjoyed a drink. It was nervous-making at first, but I loved that there was no pressure to interact with others and that plenty of people there were just like me — quiet and reading their books.Would you like to attend a Silent Book Club meetup?
Can’t get enough, or looking for a different recommendation? Browse the archives, or check out some popular past recommendations:
A matriarch tries to orchestrate her own obituaries, and everything goes wrong
Read about a historical family inheritance that comes with a catch
An enchanting and beautiful island starts to turn against its visitors
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Content warnings include sexual assault (in the past, recounted to another character); enslavement; mentions of sexual assault of women and girls (there are stories of “breeding ships,” which Myra wants to avoid at all costs)’ gun violence'; general violence and fighting; blood mentions; alcohol abuse; harm to child by way of disease (details: small child gets an infected finger, and it must be cut off, on page but not detailed).
I just finished reading The Midwich Cuckoos, which is classic, chilling sci-fi from 1957. Spooky in all the right ways. Fascinating in its implications. When a mysterious incident causes all the eligible childbearing women in town to get pregnant at the same time and give birth to a pack of golden-eyed children with troubling powers, what will the town do to make sure their secret remains just that. And when the threat becomes more about the world's safety than the town's...what's to be done?
It was a quick read, and hoo boy did it make me think.
I recently listened to an advance audio copy of Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan. It's a different genre than After the Flood but the base idea of a world that has been partially submerged is the same. I enjoyed Fathomfolk and having read that, it makes me want to read After the Flood now too to get a completely different story about life in a water-filled world.