A CHILDREN'S BIBLE by Lydia Millet

A group of families are vacationing together in a very large waterfront house.  The kids, completely unsupervised except by one another, are the main characters, with the heavy-drinking parents in the background.  In fact, the parents are basically a collective entity, and the kids are playing a guessing game as to who belongs to whom; no one really wants to claim their own parents.  This book initially called Lord of the Flies to mind, but the kids are a little older, much more compatible, and basically seem better off without the adults’ interference.  When a huge storm befalls them, flooding the property and knocking out power, the kids have the good sense to head for a farm, where they have an ample supply of just about everything.  Then a pregnant mother shows up, followed by a band of violent outlaws, and things start to deteriorate rapidly.  Up until this point, the novel has been pretty lighthearted, but the arrival of the villains isn’t the only bad news.  The survival of the planet is at stake here.  The teenaged narrator, Evie, finds that her 9-year-old brother, Jack, has acquired a child’s version of the Bible and has captured an assortment of wild animals, like Noah but without the pairings, in an effort to save them from destruction.  This book may be an allegory of sorts, but Jack is astute enough to see the Bible as one as well.  He equates God with nature and Jesus with science, and his reasoning for doing so is very clever.  There are lots of other Bible story parallels, but the backbone of the novel is not an allegory.  The kids blame their parents’ generation for not being good custodians of our planet and rightfully so.  This novel can be seen as a call to action.  Ignoring the problem will not make it go away.