The Waters Rising by Sherri S. Tepper

The Waters Rising

A princess is dying from a mysterious illness.  A young soul carrier has been found to take her soul from Norland to her homeland across the sea.  But first the child must do a favor for the princess and retrieve a package that she has hidden.  She is told that her highest priority is to get herself and the contents of the package back across the sea to the land of Tingawa that the princess came from.

Neighboring kingdoms are controlled by an evil family who have been trained as killers by a mysterious Old Dark Man.  They have an absolute hatred of Tingawans.  They will stop at nothing to make sure the soul carrier doesn’t make it to her ship alive.

Meanwhile the waters are rising.  Eventually they will swamp all the land on Earth.  Already villages have had to move to higher ground.  While the people of Norland try to adapt to the changing landscape, the leaders of Tingawa and the Sea King have decided to plan for the eventual demise of the Earth.

This book is actually telling two different stories.  The first is the story of the evil family and why they are trying to kill the Tingawans.  That wasn’t that interesting to me.  It covered the first part of the book and did drag.  If it wasn’t for the fact that I love this author and that there is a sequel to this book now that I want to read I’d have stopped.

The second story is the plan for survival when there is no more land.  This story I was interested in.  I think this is the story that continues into the sequel.  When the book got to this part it started to really move quickly for me.

I’m looking forward to reading Fish Tails to see what happens.

**I just looked it up on Goodreads to get that link and there are characters in there from a series that I have but that I haven’t read yet.  Crap.  It looks like she is tying together her entire lifetime of books into one big finale. Now I have read the others to properly appreciate it! **