This was a beautiful book where not a lot happens. I want to be up front about that, because I know that will either make this book for you or cause you to hate it.

Nonie and her family grow up on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History, following a series of devastating climate-related disasters. A small community collects on the roof of this museum, experiencing the flooding, the plagues, and incredibly strong storms together. One incredibly strong storm (a "hypercane") ultimately tears apart the AMNH, driving Nonie, her father, and her sister out onto the open waters of the city in a boat salvaged from a display. This book is about their journey to a family farm to hopefully be safe again.

This is very much a "journey" book and not a "destination" book, as in, things happen to Nonie and her family along the way in an episodic form, they resolve whatever issue comes up, and they move onto the next story beat. Interspersed in these chapters are stories from Nonie's past with her mom, their old apartment, and stories from after their move to AMNH, painting a larger picture of their family and how they got to that point. There's a destination, a goal of sorts, for the book, but the vast majority of the book takes place on the open....river, I guess, and beyond a "we have to get here" nod occasionally throughout Nonie's story, we're very much in the present and here and now.

I thought the writing was beautiful, and it's really what carried me through this book. Despite the bleak tone of the book (and it really is a bleak book, I'm not gonna lie), Nonie's experiences are painted incredibly vividly. It's very dystopian, very post-apocalyptic (in a near sense), and you really do end up feeling the danger and tenseness of a lot of situations Nonie and her family get into.

I guess my only real quibble here is the abruptness or shortness of the ending. I won't go into details and throw this whole review into spoiler territory, but I wish we got just a little bit more with this family at the end, beyond the crumbs we were given.

Just a real bittersweet, kind of terrifying view of how things might end up one day.

"Take care."

Kind of more of the same. A lot of what I said about the first book in this series, We'll Prescribe You A Cat, is applicable here. We're revisiting Kokoro Clinic for the Soul, staffed by cats-posing-as-people, where only people who find themselves lost in their life can get an appointment. This book is four more people with four more problems, who are prescribed a cat (or, more than one cat) to help them fix their lives.

Unlike the first book though, I felt like the problems aren't actually solved by the cats. Sure, the cats are present and clearly are a benefit to their keepers, but unlike the first book where you can draw a line linking the cat to the problem to the solution, that feels missing here. As a result, it feels a little like the cats take a back seat to the actual problems being resolved, which is a disappointment in a book about, y'know, prescription cats.

I read this to finish out the series, but I feel like the first book is the better of the two.