CBR BINGO – Book Club
Admittedly, I am getting a jump on this book club reading. My local bookstore, Brazos Bookstore, has chosen this book as it’s October book club selection and will be inviting author Lydia Millet to a virtual Q&A and discussion. This book was available at my library right before I was going on vacation for a week, so I had to snatch it up.
Evie and her brother Jack are two kids out of many whose families vacation together each summer. The parents rent a house in the Northeast and everyone goes to escape: parents escape their day-to-day and the kids escape the control and purview of their parents. The kids even go so far to eschew all ties to their parents during the summer as to make a game of guessing which kid belongs to which adult, a game they take extremely seriously. The children range in age from around 5 all the way to 18 but they are all intelligent and precocious. They are independent to a fault.
That independence gets flexed more when an extreme hurricane, caused by shifting extreme climate change, hits. The parents go through the standard protocols of boarding window and gathering supplies, but it is the children that put plans into motion when the parents fall apart. The children understand the world and its state better than the parents ever could because they were born into it whereas the parents were the ones who caused it. What transpires is a pre-apocalypse tale that I greatly enjoyed. I’ve read plenty of post-apocalyptic novels, but nothing quite like what Millet has created in A Children’ Bible.
This book is also rich with allegory and symbolism. I listened to this book as an audiobook (which was good; the voice actor did well), but I’m sure that if I had a physical copy of my own, this is one that I would have marked up and annotated just like my English teachers and professors taught me. The story and characters are rich and well-developed, but Millet writing elevates everything to a higher level.