Beyond the Water Meadows

Thank you to NetGalley and Troubadour Publishing Ltd. for the arc of Beyond the Water Meadows. How would the world be different if you had never ventured past your yard? If you knew nobody outside of your household? For Daisy this is her life. After four pandemics and years of lock downs, cultural revolutions, global warming, and the take over of the Chinese as a world power Daisy has never known a world outside Xunzi House, the care home where she lives. Now the world is changing and lock down is over, the children and teenagers are about to discover that there is a whole lot more of the world to explore and there are a lot more dangers in the world than just becoming sick. Allder created a wonderful reimagining of our world if pandemics as well as other social issues continue. There is a lot about the world that could have been explained in deeper detail, and I would love a history book rather than vague notions from our narrator. What I enjoyed about this book is the timeliness and the parts where you could pick out very interesting pieces or little laugh points that have to do with our world today (rainbow pictures in a window of an abandoned house from the "first" pandemic and C-Pop that took me 3/4 of the book to realize was Covid-Pop). What made this book challenging was that it was sometimes told as if it was from Daisy as a 15 year old's perspective but sometime a much older Daisy would interject reminding the reader that it was all a memory. Overall, a well written book that sucked me into the story and despite being slow moving at first the last half of the book flies by.