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3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
After finding this in our office’s little free library (shoutout to Stephanie for showing me this wasn’t actually a child edition bible and was, in fact, a novel
Je n'ai globalement pas cru à cette histoire. Ça arrive. J'ai trouvé le parti-pris bien trop cynique . Le portrait des familles dysfonctionnelles, sur lequel est basée l'intrigue, m'a paru excessif. Et le récit survivaliste pas très crédible . J'ai accéléré quelques dizaines de pages avant la fin .
Too many characters and it felt like they were all just sketches. Maybe this would be my review of the Bible too if I finally got around to reading it cover to cover one day?
wow, this is an amazing book. Lord of the Flies vibes, but if that was actually a good book. Lord of the Flies + climate change + wresting power from the useless older generation. Wow.
I didn’t love this book. I made my way through it - just too close to home and depressing. It was certainly multilayered and was well written. I liked the unique narration.
Lydia Millet has somehow managed to novelise the precise energy created by Greta Thunberg’s iconically defiant interrogation of UN leaders last year (“how dare you?!”) in ‘A Children’s Bible’, a very zeitgeisty retelling of ‘Lord of the Flies’, in which the juvenile uprising is wilful, a hyperbolic manifestation of an ‘okay, boomer’ mindset.
Rich in allegory, this fabulist tale couldn’t be anymore 2020. It reminded me a lot of both ‘The New Wilderness’ and ‘Leave the World Behind’, all three books conveying a remarkable sense of ‘now-ness’ in their thematic rendering of current fears and malaise. Generational distrust, apocalyptic ambiguity and climate change fears are funnelled through the lens of religious allegory here in bizarre but ultimately page-turning ways. Millet’s novel works best on a symbolic level, with the plot’s biblical twists and turns opting for resonance rather than plausibility. However, there’s an ironic and wry wit to the narrating that I thoroughly enjoyed.
What’s it about? Well, that’s harder to say. On the surface, the book is about a bunch of precocious and cynical children on holiday with their irresponsible, neglectful parents. Contemptuous and stifled by them in equal measure, the offspring decide to head off by themselves after a destructive storm descends on the holiday home. As the children move into the apocalyptic chaos of the outside world, events begin to mimic those in the dog-eared children’s Bible beloved by one of the youngest amongst them. From there, eerie, haunting, prophetic shenanigans await. It’s good fun and as confusing and unsettling as a book released in 2020 should be.
Rich in allegory, this fabulist tale couldn’t be anymore 2020. It reminded me a lot of both ‘The New Wilderness’ and ‘Leave the World Behind’, all three books conveying a remarkable sense of ‘now-ness’ in their thematic rendering of current fears and malaise. Generational distrust, apocalyptic ambiguity and climate change fears are funnelled through the lens of religious allegory here in bizarre but ultimately page-turning ways. Millet’s novel works best on a symbolic level, with the plot’s biblical twists and turns opting for resonance rather than plausibility. However, there’s an ironic and wry wit to the narrating that I thoroughly enjoyed.
What’s it about? Well, that’s harder to say. On the surface, the book is about a bunch of precocious and cynical children on holiday with their irresponsible, neglectful parents. Contemptuous and stifled by them in equal measure, the offspring decide to head off by themselves after a destructive storm descends on the holiday home. As the children move into the apocalyptic chaos of the outside world, events begin to mimic those in the dog-eared children’s Bible beloved by one of the youngest amongst them. From there, eerie, haunting, prophetic shenanigans await. It’s good fun and as confusing and unsettling as a book released in 2020 should be.
I found myself gasping at how beautiful the writing in this book is. Generational divide in the face of the apocalypse. JAW DROPPING!! Would recommend to everyone.
My favourite moments:
“Gone, they changed into abstractions. They were ideas, and ideas were more romantic than people.”
“And all they ever were was themselves.
Still they had wanted to be different. I would assume that from now on, I told myself, wandering back into the barn. What people wanted to be, but never could, traveled along beside them. Company.”
My favourite moments:
“Gone, they changed into abstractions. They were ideas, and ideas were more romantic than people.”
“And all they ever were was themselves.
Still they had wanted to be different. I would assume that from now on, I told myself, wandering back into the barn. What people wanted to be, but never could, traveled along beside them. Company.”
Hit close to home. Felt adjacent to a post-apocalyptic (though disturbingly not too far in the future) Lord of the Flies, except with the addition of some drunk, extremely low-functioning parents.