All the Water in the World
A Novel
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A stunning debut novel about a teenage girl and her mother as they grapple with first love, family secrets, and tragedy.
Maddy is sixteen. Smart, funny, and profound, she has loyal friends, a mother with whom she’s unusually close, a father she’s never met, devoted grandparents, and a crush on a boy named Jack. Maddy also has cancer. Living in the shadow of uncertainty, she is forced to grow up fast.
All the Water in the World is the story of a family doing its best when faced with the worst. Told in the alternating voices of Maddy and her mother, Eve, the narrative moves between the family’s lake house in Pennsylvania; their home in Washington, DC; and London, where Maddy’s father, Antonio, lives. Hungry for experience, Maddy seeks out her first romantic relationship, finds solace in music and art, and tracks down Antonio. She continually tests the depths and limits of her closeness with her mother, while Eve has to come to terms with the daughter she only partly knows, in a world she can’t control.
With unforgettable voices that range from tender to funny, despairing to defiant, this novel illuminates the transformative power of love, humor, and hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Raney's ardent debut examines love and loss through the eyes of Maddy, a vibrant 16-year-old girl diagnosed with cancer, and Eve, her loving mother. Maddy is spending the summer recovering from chemotherapy at her family's lake house in Pennsylvania. While her thoughts often turn to normal adolescent concerns such as her summer reading assignments and her crush they are also studded with existential worries as she contemplates death, the existence of God, and the ephemerality of nature. Maddy begins to think about her father, who separated amicably from her mother before she was born, and decides she must get to know him before she dies. Over her final summer, Maddy and her father begin an epistolary friendship and bond over their mutual love of nature and advocacy for environmental protections. Reading the correspondence is painful for Eve when she later finds the letters. Eve, struggling to process everything, begins to spend long hours at the lake talking with her neighbor Norma. The book is broken into three sections, and is at its strongest when Maddy's naive, searching voice narrates the story, which is effused with a passion for life and nature. However, the novel's final section loses momentum, tapering off into Eve's self-examination and excavation of the past. Raney's pleasing tale is a deep, genuine investigation of memory, the pain of loss, and the strength of a mother's love.
Customer Reviews
Disappointing
Immature in all the wrong places. Characters came across as spoiled and manipulative. Worst part was the extreme emphasis on global warming and all of the side effects of that issue. Overall a sloppy and immature rendition of a very serious story. Shame. I really wanted to love this. I had to force myself to finish it.