Reviews with content warning for Animal cruelty - A Children's Bible

Reviews tagging 'Animal cruelty'

A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

7 reviews

sarahjulianna's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Content Warnings

gotnoculture's review against another edition

Go to review page

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 when

the 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.

Content Warnings