A Children's Bible

I got this from the library at the beach over vacation and read it in a day. I just couldn’t put it down.

A Children’s Bible is a weird, dark, vaguely post-apocalyptic story for adults featuring a child protagonist. In other words, right up my alley. Readers may guess from my own work I love young protagonists. They have a lot of power, especially when they take the reader through some heavy topics.

I really connected with the narrator in this story, and I loved the way Millet showed both her maturity and wisdom and her youth, all mixed together.… show more.

During a group summer vacation on a beachy East Coast hideaway, the age-old dynamics of young vs. old—and the have-a-lots vs. the have-less—are in full play. The result sounds like any number of 20th-century American literary dramas, until it becomes clear that the disasters that loom are far larger than any single-family or community. Millet’s playful, snarky novel is a portrayal of what may come as the young realize how thoroughly older generations have sold out their future. The adults may be lost, but the kids are alright.

I loved this book. It made me laugh and it made me cry. Any book that does both is on my list of keepers, and Lydia Millet did both so well. She created characters I care about and put them in situations that kept me turning pages.

The plot revolves around a group of kids vacationing with their parents who were friends in college and have reunited for the first time. The narrator, a teenager, describes the adults in less than flattering terms, especially when a hurricane descends on their rented mansion.

Millet portrays the absurdity of ignoring what is… show more.

This unflinching novel follows a group of twelve children and teenagers through a world-ending storm and its aftermath. The primary tension is between the teens and their impotent parents, who descend into alcohol, drugs, and orgies as the storm hits and leave their children to mostly fend for themselves. The message embedded in this setup is hardly subtle, but Millet brilliantly incorporates and subverts Christian iconography to craft a startlingly original Book of Genesis for those born into the climate crisis.