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lngerst's review against another edition
dark
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.0
ohclaire's review against another edition
4.0
Healing to both my childhood swiss family robinson obsession & the pandemic!
diegobrando's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
fishky's review against another edition
3.0
2.5? 3? I know I'm not incredibly consistent with these reviews, so caveat: the rating is often reflective of how I felt at the end of the book (and may change the more I think about it.) I ended this book feeling somewhat frustrated and thinking....this was...fine?
The writing was undeniably good, and the author's phraseology was beautiful and philosophical. I resonated with the cold and practical attitude that the youth had toward the parents and about a world on the verge of climate apocalypse. Plagues, flooding, disease, the depravity of the alt-right...it isn't a hypothetical world, but it has centered the attitudes of the wealthy-but-not-1%-professionally-liberal directly into the world they feel has spiraled out of control through no fault of their own. This was one of the strongest points: the parents in the book are all written so perfectly as monolithically distant hedonists with placeholder values (enforcing no-technology rules) to compensate for the truth that they really don't give a shit about their children and the world that they are leaving them.
The book started strong: I love the premise of wealthy (professors, popular modern artists, a gynecologist, a therapist, a director, etc) renting a massive house (later it is revealed that there is a 70k deposit) for a summer where they each have their own rooms with children aged 9 to 17 tossed into a large attic space and given free (though devoid of technology) reign through the house and surrounding property. The kids burn ugly art from the house, play a game where they try to keep the others from knowing which ones are their parents, and have a shared disdain and embarrassment of the adults despite the age gaps. They have their forest and camping domains. The parents are wealthy, but feel that they are not wealthy enough to have any impact on the world (makes me think of how it is fucked up to blame individual behavior like using straws for climate change, but how it also feels irresponsible to not try to make behavioral changes in the expectation that the world that one should also be actively fighting for will be less wasteful) and I love when the youth meet a group of 1%ers who have VERY wealthy parents — and those parents take action (have elaborate bunkers).
But maybe it is the strength of the premise (and a regular cadence of new fun plot points) that left me feeling so disappointed — because the youth are a monolith, too. There is a vague solidarity among some of them when it comes to mild distaste of some 1% youth that they meet on their journey, but I'm struggling to think of a single one of the cast of 12+ that has more than a single personality point. I think Mattie, a minor character who was a biologist/de facto teacher/trail angel/vague Jesus figure, showed the most nuance and situational awareness in a grand total of 20 speaking lines. But even Mattie wasn't particularly humanized: the only empathetic characters were Jack and Shel (who was only there to add a bit of situational humor to Jack's hijinks, as far as I could tell).
The youth hate their parents, or feel apathetic towards them, though they feel dutiful responsibility. They do not want to get old (disgusting) but they value the lives we have. They listen with exasperation that borders on fondness to their parents' ideas of societal order and rule of law. The parents themselves are portrayed as generally uncaring — when small children are lost, when one of them dies in childbirth, when that infant is being raised by the children, when a teenager is sleeping with a much older man, when the kids are in danger — but the youth have the same attitude with different values, which is to protect their own in-group. The narrator loves her brother, and her brother loves his friend and animals, and that is the only emotion really shown. I tried to keep track of names and personalities, but it didn't matter, because none of them had real interpersonal connections. The youth were, I assume, supposed to be a foil for the parents: I read other reviews of this book, wondering what I'd missed, and there was a lot of talk about how they represent Gen Zers like Greta Thurnberg. That simply wasn't the case. They looked out for each other, but their connections seemed to be rooted in a common enemy of parents with one line from the narrator about how also they really like being alive. There wasn't any friendship. The narrator loves her brother, but she just wants to protect him from the harsh realities of the world. She has no particular philosophies of his own (except for that being alive is neat). The brother and his friend are very smart, but in a way that feels gimmicky, like learning that the side character in a show who seems quite dull has a secret talent as an opera singer. Which brings me to the biblical shit.
I am, in part, writing all of this out because of all of the reviews I read (including an author interview). For me, the constant spattering of biblical references (I was expecting it as I too can read the title) and other scattered, Western mythology did nothing for me. Here is part of a review from the New York Times:
"Jack keeps noticing — and duly pointing out, to the uninterested others — parallels between current events and the stories in “my book.” There are more, even, than he catches: There’s a birth in a barn, a plague, a Moses, a Cain and an Abel, even a crucifixion. But part of the novel’s genius is that these allusions never really lead anywhere — they don’t coalesce into some superstructure of metaphor. The baby born in the manger is just a baby. The allusions aren’t symbols or clues; they’re just faint echoes, like puzzle pieces too few to fit together. They don’t mean what we’re used to them meaning."
Maybe it is the fault of this review that I feel so strongly oppositional, but I think the fact that the allusions are meaningless is not subversive. Also, none of this is subtle. It's just an onslaught and Jack's cheesy revelation that God is Nature and Jesus is Science and the Holy Ghost is Art made me cringe. Is the author saying that the bible....is metaphors? and we can interpret them...how we want? and also...who cares? but also....this is what the book is named after and also is about? With the exception of Jack's determination to save the animals from flooding, there is simply no reason for this to be the mesh knitting this book together. When I read reviews like the above, about how lack of character depth or cohesive metaphor are brilliant, actually, it feels bizarre. The book itself makes fun of the narrator's father, a cis man (they are all white or white passing?) who paints scenes of war aftermath on sculptures of women to the acclaim of many others like him. This is funny! But it does not change the fact that reviewers applauding the...subversive...lack of depth feels like a weird parody. Also, in the span of a chapter near the end, when the youth are pitted against a group of selfish, armed adults, they do not manage to fight back. An angel/God figure (complete with holy rules) comes down and burns them all to death, including the few adults who are actively trying to help them (but the parents are saved so they can disappear later to fulfill another halfassed metaphor). The God figure employs supernatural talents to do this murder and to heal a broken leg. The God figure has rules, like respect adults, that are clearly the ten commandments, but they are bad rules (like respect adults). If this is supposed to be another meaningless Bible reference.....why does the God figure have superpowers. I really don't get it. Why would the penultimate plot point be solved by divine intervention magic. I feel exasperated just thinking about it. The narrator is like "weird" and that's that. RIP, Mattie et al.
I think this is the reason why I kind of resent this book: like the parents, it is both self-aware and cold and deeply ironic. And like the youth, I feel impatient and annoyed that the author couldn't take perceived belief systems and take it to a level with human impact. I do not get what the author intended. I think it is probably just "edgy climate change story by someone who is obviously good at technical writing and well-versed in environmental issues." But I just feel frustrated with this incredibly insightful setup that has no redeeming characters, no new insights, a narrative dedication to setting things up only to explain that they are meaningless, and an ending sequence where Jack (maybe dying? is he Jesus now? didn't Mattie already do that? or does it make it more edgy that there can be multiple Jesuses that actually don't matter?) and the narrator decide that Nature and Science are only completed by Art (they have created no art, appreciated no art, have not mentioned any sort of art, but it is true that they burned ugly tchotchkes at the start of the book, please God that cannot be the tie in). I truly, truly don't get it. Was this an ending written for an alternate version of the book that had a drastically different plot? Are we supposed to care about the Jack character because the single personality point that he was allocated is that he likes animals? And if we can assume this is true, is his sickness only there to add emotion? Is it supposed to mean something? Do I not understand this because my knowledge of the bible comes from existing in this society and accidentally dating Catholics all the time and not from like, going to church?
TL;DR: a super compelling outline hastily filled in by old crayons, all shades of the same color.
The writing was undeniably good, and the author's phraseology was beautiful and philosophical. I resonated with the cold and practical attitude that the youth had toward the parents and about a world on the verge of climate apocalypse. Plagues, flooding, disease, the depravity of the alt-right...it isn't a hypothetical world, but it has centered the attitudes of the wealthy-but-not-1%-professionally-liberal directly into the world they feel has spiraled out of control through no fault of their own. This was one of the strongest points: the parents in the book are all written so perfectly as monolithically distant hedonists with placeholder values (enforcing no-technology rules) to compensate for the truth that they really don't give a shit about their children and the world that they are leaving them.
The book started strong: I love the premise of wealthy (professors, popular modern artists, a gynecologist, a therapist, a director, etc) renting a massive house (later it is revealed that there is a 70k deposit) for a summer where they each have their own rooms with children aged 9 to 17 tossed into a large attic space and given free (though devoid of technology) reign through the house and surrounding property. The kids burn ugly art from the house, play a game where they try to keep the others from knowing which ones are their parents, and have a shared disdain and embarrassment of the adults despite the age gaps. They have their forest and camping domains. The parents are wealthy, but feel that they are not wealthy enough to have any impact on the world (makes me think of how it is fucked up to blame individual behavior like using straws for climate change, but how it also feels irresponsible to not try to make behavioral changes in the expectation that the world that one should also be actively fighting for will be less wasteful) and I love when the youth meet a group of 1%ers who have VERY wealthy parents — and those parents take action (have elaborate bunkers).
But maybe it is the strength of the premise (and a regular cadence of new fun plot points) that left me feeling so disappointed — because the youth are a monolith, too. There is a vague solidarity among some of them when it comes to mild distaste of some 1% youth that they meet on their journey, but I'm struggling to think of a single one of the cast of 12+ that has more than a single personality point. I think Mattie, a minor character who was a biologist/de facto teacher/trail angel/vague Jesus figure, showed the most nuance and situational awareness in a grand total of 20 speaking lines. But even Mattie wasn't particularly humanized: the only empathetic characters were Jack and Shel (who was only there to add a bit of situational humor to Jack's hijinks, as far as I could tell).
The youth hate their parents, or feel apathetic towards them, though they feel dutiful responsibility. They do not want to get old (disgusting) but they value the lives we have. They listen with exasperation that borders on fondness to their parents' ideas of societal order and rule of law. The parents themselves are portrayed as generally uncaring — when small children are lost, when one of them dies in childbirth, when that infant is being raised by the children, when a teenager is sleeping with a much older man, when the kids are in danger — but the youth have the same attitude with different values, which is to protect their own in-group. The narrator loves her brother, and her brother loves his friend and animals, and that is the only emotion really shown. I tried to keep track of names and personalities, but it didn't matter, because none of them had real interpersonal connections. The youth were, I assume, supposed to be a foil for the parents: I read other reviews of this book, wondering what I'd missed, and there was a lot of talk about how they represent Gen Zers like Greta Thurnberg. That simply wasn't the case. They looked out for each other, but their connections seemed to be rooted in a common enemy of parents with one line from the narrator about how also they really like being alive. There wasn't any friendship. The narrator loves her brother, but she just wants to protect him from the harsh realities of the world. She has no particular philosophies of his own (except for that being alive is neat). The brother and his friend are very smart, but in a way that feels gimmicky, like learning that the side character in a show who seems quite dull has a secret talent as an opera singer. Which brings me to the biblical shit.
I am, in part, writing all of this out because of all of the reviews I read (including an author interview). For me, the constant spattering of biblical references (I was expecting it as I too can read the title) and other scattered, Western mythology did nothing for me. Here is part of a review from the New York Times:
"Jack keeps noticing — and duly pointing out, to the uninterested others — parallels between current events and the stories in “my book.” There are more, even, than he catches: There’s a birth in a barn, a plague, a Moses, a Cain and an Abel, even a crucifixion. But part of the novel’s genius is that these allusions never really lead anywhere — they don’t coalesce into some superstructure of metaphor. The baby born in the manger is just a baby. The allusions aren’t symbols or clues; they’re just faint echoes, like puzzle pieces too few to fit together. They don’t mean what we’re used to them meaning."
Maybe it is the fault of this review that I feel so strongly oppositional, but I think the fact that the allusions are meaningless is not subversive. Also, none of this is subtle. It's just an onslaught and Jack's cheesy revelation that God is Nature and Jesus is Science and the Holy Ghost is Art made me cringe. Is the author saying that the bible....is metaphors? and we can interpret them...how we want? and also...who cares? but also....this is what the book is named after and also is about? With the exception of Jack's determination to save the animals from flooding, there is simply no reason for this to be the mesh knitting this book together. When I read reviews like the above, about how lack of character depth or cohesive metaphor are brilliant, actually, it feels bizarre. The book itself makes fun of the narrator's father, a cis man (they are all white or white passing?) who paints scenes of war aftermath on sculptures of women to the acclaim of many others like him. This is funny! But it does not change the fact that reviewers applauding the...subversive...lack of depth feels like a weird parody. Also, in the span of a chapter near the end, when the youth are pitted against a group of selfish, armed adults, they do not manage to fight back. An angel/God figure (complete with holy rules) comes down and burns them all to death, including the few adults who are actively trying to help them (but the parents are saved so they can disappear later to fulfill another halfassed metaphor). The God figure employs supernatural talents to do this murder and to heal a broken leg. The God figure has rules, like respect adults, that are clearly the ten commandments, but they are bad rules (like respect adults). If this is supposed to be another meaningless Bible reference.....why does the God figure have superpowers. I really don't get it. Why would the penultimate plot point be solved by divine intervention magic. I feel exasperated just thinking about it. The narrator is like "weird" and that's that. RIP, Mattie et al.
I think this is the reason why I kind of resent this book: like the parents, it is both self-aware and cold and deeply ironic. And like the youth, I feel impatient and annoyed that the author couldn't take perceived belief systems and take it to a level with human impact. I do not get what the author intended. I think it is probably just "edgy climate change story by someone who is obviously good at technical writing and well-versed in environmental issues." But I just feel frustrated with this incredibly insightful setup that has no redeeming characters, no new insights, a narrative dedication to setting things up only to explain that they are meaningless, and an ending sequence where Jack (maybe dying? is he Jesus now? didn't Mattie already do that? or does it make it more edgy that there can be multiple Jesuses that actually don't matter?) and the narrator decide that Nature and Science are only completed by Art (they have created no art, appreciated no art, have not mentioned any sort of art, but it is true that they burned ugly tchotchkes at the start of the book, please God that cannot be the tie in). I truly, truly don't get it. Was this an ending written for an alternate version of the book that had a drastically different plot? Are we supposed to care about the Jack character because the single personality point that he was allocated is that he likes animals? And if we can assume this is true, is his sickness only there to add emotion? Is it supposed to mean something? Do I not understand this because my knowledge of the bible comes from existing in this society and accidentally dating Catholics all the time and not from like, going to church?
TL;DR: a super compelling outline hastily filled in by old crayons, all shades of the same color.
isabellesbooks's review against another edition
4.0
This book feels like an out-of-body experience that I just very suddenly woke up from
gotnoculture's review against another edition
I felt no attachment to the characters. The book’s message is simultaneously muddled and heavy handed. The biblical imagery is incredibly obvious and leaves no room for interpretation, and is at points straight up explained to us in-text by a character. It felt like this book did not trust me to form any of my own conclusions.
A blurb on the dust jacket said the children in this book were “eerily mature” but frankly I just felt they were poorly written. The way the young people talk is overdone and unbelievable; I think the author was attempting to mimic teenhood by just making the characters rude? They throw around the R slur so much, which made this book feel stuck in 2008 despite its supposedly modern setting. And it was just an unnecessarily offensive and upsetting inclusion.
But the fatal flaw, which made me unable to complete the book, was the author’s intense, transparent fatphobia. Throughout the novel fatness is directly associated with idiocy and cruelty. The bumbling useless parents are fat, the cruel soldier-types are fat. But whenthe parents finally show up to be helpful, they are described as having become thin. This book attempts a message about youth struggling with the mistakes and foolishness of earlier generations, but the potential of this message is dashed by the authors obsessive association of youth with thinness. Over and over again fatness is described as a disgusting trait of the foolish and gluttonous.
This also lends to the author’s struggles with producing any complex metaphors or meanings. We get gluttonous = fat, youthfulness = good and capable, ignorant = ugly, and many other superficial associations. This paired with trite religious imagery had me frequently rolling my eyes.
I have the review at two stars to give the benefit of the doubt that it had an interesting ending, and that maybe something here was lost on me.
A blurb on the dust jacket said the children in this book were “eerily mature” but frankly I just felt they were poorly written. The way the young people talk is overdone and unbelievable; I think the author was attempting to mimic teenhood by just making the characters rude? They throw around the R slur so much, which made this book feel stuck in 2008 despite its supposedly modern setting. And it was just an unnecessarily offensive and upsetting inclusion.
But the fatal flaw, which made me unable to complete the book, was the author’s intense, transparent fatphobia. Throughout the novel fatness is directly associated with idiocy and cruelty. The bumbling useless parents are fat, the cruel soldier-types are fat. But when
This also lends to the author’s struggles with producing any complex metaphors or meanings. We get gluttonous = fat, youthfulness = good and capable, ignorant = ugly, and many other superficial associations. This paired with trite religious imagery had me frequently rolling my eyes.
I have the review at two stars to give the benefit of the doubt that it had an interesting ending, and that maybe something here was lost on me.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Fatphobia and Abandonment
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body shaming, and Death of parent
combepherre's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
birchmezz's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25