"At first blush the novel appears to be a tragic love story between . . . doomed lovers who experience the depths of betrayal, sin, and loneliness. But then a deeper layer unfolds, and we see . . . the Divine love story, the movement of God toward his creatures." - Front Porch Republic

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"No one else I know could so subtly and surely reveal the finer registers of emotion—I think of Henry James—in a story of acceptance and conversion. As Earth Without Water continues to work on the imagination long after the last page." - Glenn Arbery, president, Wyoming Catholic College

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"Katy Carl gives us a vision of love that refuses to be caught up in consoling fantasy. Amidst the darkness of human sin and self-deception, Carl reveals the true complexity, depth, and promise of human longing. A powerful and stunning debut novel." - Jennifer Frey, host of Sacred & Profane Love podcast

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"It is when Carl’s ... characters stop running that they open themselves up to eucatastrophe." - LA Review of Books

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"Readers will want to go back to the beginning to see the quiet, slow growth of this love all over again." - American 

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"To be most oneself, to be truly free, is to locate not where home is but Who home is." - Catholic Courier

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"With each new advance up the seven-storey mountain ... little and big surprises accumulate." - Benedict XVI Institute

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"[The novel] adds a contemporary link to a long chain of Catholic literature, riffing on elements from these stories to reinvent them in a context more immediately relatable to our even more post- post-Christian society." - Psaltery & Lyre

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"This nexus of vision, love, and knowledge pulls in, and is pulled into, the divine, and is itself the picture with which the novel leaves me." - Light on Dark Water

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"Carl’s artistry is unlike the pastiche of high modernist works like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which seeks to unsettle readers with the weight of the Western intellectual tradition. Rather, it is through the dialogue of her characters that Carl’s novel should unsettle us, showing us the distinction between contemporary liberty and true freedom." - Law & LIberty

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