Laura van den Berg writes beautifully. Her sentences and paragraphs feel like gauzy, ethereal dreams. It’s the kind of writing that seems effortless which means it probably took great amounts of effort. She populates the stories of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us with people on quests for mythical creatures — bigfoot, Nessie the Loch Ness monster, Mishegenabeg (a monster said to inhabit Lake Michigan) –which adds to this dreamlike quality. But make no mistake these people live in the same world we live in and face the same kinds of problems we face. They’re all dealing with some kind of loss — parents, career aspirations, husbands or boyfriends — and are searching for something to fill the hole that loss has left in them.

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