Take one part "You ruined EVERYTHING, mom and dad!", one part religious allegory, and a dash of Mad Max, and you have A Children's Bible, a novel that lets us know that the kids are not all right, they're really screwed, so thanks for nothing, you guys.

We begin with a community of parents, old college friends, reuniting one summer in a large rural mansion along with their various kids. The parents don't seem to care much about the kids and the kids certainly don't care much for the parents, in fact they despise them:

Dinner was the only meal we had to attend, and even that we resented. They sat us down and talked about nothing. They aimed their conversation like a dull gray beam. It hit us and lulled us into a stupor. What they said was so boring it filled us with frustration, and after more minutes, rage. Didn't they know there were urgent subjects? Questions that needed to be asked?

Yes, this is an exceptionally serious group of teens and children we've got here. They have to be though, I suppose, what with a climate apocalypse bearing down on them, which begins with a hurricane hitting the mansion, provoking a flood that is compared to a certain famous flood. And oh yeah, this novel is narrated by a teen named Eve. And there's a twin who maybe kills her sister. And there's a man who is discovered in a clump of weeds along the water in a raft, who later sees a bush covered in golden flowers, and who leads the kids on a trek through the wilderness to a well-stocked compound. Then an unwed mother shows up who gives birth in the stable. And just in case you somehow haven't caught on yet, we're told the compound is near Bethlehem (PA).

At which point enter the Mad Max scenario, as a group of redneck thugs who've taken refuge in the local McDonald's shows up, commits appalling violence on the group and steals all their stockpiled food, even though it's apparently still normal enough out there that utility crews are on surrounding roads repairing infrastructure, and online shopping is still a thing, so this really makes no sense when you could still just have Amazon deliver boxes of granola bars, you know.

The religious allegory seems to peter out now as the group moves to an upstate NY mansion and settles in to prepare for the collapse of civilization, while still shopping online. And still hating on the parents.

"Listen. We know we let you down," said a mother. "But what could we have done, really?"
"Fight," said Rafe. "Did you ever fight?"
"Or did you just do exactly what you wanted?" said Jen. "Always?"
The mothers looked at each other. A father rubbed his beard. Others put hands in pockets, rocked back and forth on their heels and studied the pile of dirt beside the stones.

So yeah it's true that most of us are just living our lives currently without blockading gas stations or anything, but this is a rather ham-handed simplistic way of critiquing our society sleepwalking to environmental disaster, in my opinion. But there's still truth to it, we're still not doing enough and the kids will bear the brunt of the effects - though they will fall far more heavily on kids in poor countries on the periphery of the global economy than on rich kids in America, but okay.

Despite the issues, this is a decently entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking novel, and deserves credit for being fast-paced and not taking an extra hundred pages or two to seem more weighty, something this novel really couldn't have borne. ( )

I was led to believe the whole novel was a re-working of creation myths. There are definitely creation motifs in the story, but I think it more accurate to explain the book as a re-imagined biblical account. It's a very short, quick-moving account of several families (numbers are never disclosed and I didn't care to try to calculate the approximations) who rent a home on the coast for the summer. When a tropical storm hits and throws the area into chaos, it's the kids who persevere and trouble-shoot to survive, not the parents who are too stuck in their affluent financial world with its conveniences and alcohol. So yes, there's a idyllic garden of eden, "save the animals" Noah's ark and a flood, twins who almost kill (not sure if it's Cain/Abel or Isaac/Esau but likely the former), finding a person floating along who leads them to a promised land flowing with milk and honey, saving angels, invaders who oppress until a mysterious person swoops in and rescues the families, a new world order and further unravelling into entropy again, with a "relevation/revelation" mention in the conclusion. So, it's the biblical narrative but without the prevailing sense of hope and saving grace that people get out of the bible. I don't think it's mocking the bible or Christians, I think rather it's mocking humans for how cyclical our history is, how we ruin everything with our propensity to laziness, apathy, assumptions that life is and will be good with minimal effort. That "false gods" (in the book they are alcohol and drugs, primarily) are worthwhile pursuits and that we can buy our world without taking care of the planet. The book uses this backdrop to point a finger at the previous generations whose attitudes are so laissez-faire that they've put us into this climate crisis. it's the kids generation that has better wherewithal to do something, but even for them it might be too late.

All this commentary in a short, fast-paced, interesting story that most people will probably not even notice it.

The very entertaining story, set in the near future, of a group of children whose rich & highly educated parents take them on a summer country vacation, staying in a mansion "probably built by robber barons" and then proceed to get high and drink and generally ignore them, so much that the children play a game throughout the book in which they guess whose parents are whose. Evie is the narrator. Then, a hurricane happens. The mansion becomes an island, severely compromised. ( )

Once we had let them do everything for us—assumed they would. Then came the day we didn’t want them to.

Still later we found out that they hadn’t done everything at all. They’d left out the important part.

And it was known as: the future.

An eerily prescient parable about the schisms between parents and children, as—headed into an unknown (and increasingly violent) future due to climate change, a hinted-at pandemic, and government inaction—parents drink to drown their sorrows and forget their pain, leaving their children to discover the truths about the world around them on their own. In A Children's Bible, Millet has really tapped into the generational divide, as well as the class divide in America, in terms of how reactive, non-reactive, or reactionary we get when faced with uncertainty, chaos, and the primordial push toward self-survival.

4.5 stars ( )

A Children’s Bible held my attention but was a MOOD. Not a happy headspace. Also, I’m not familiar enough with the Bible to have caught all the allusions I’m guessing were there. Still, an interesting read. ( )