A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

4 stars
A group of adults and their tribe of unsupervised kids ranging in ages are on an extended holiday along the coast. The adults spend all day drinking and laying around while the kids have the run of the estate to the ocean beyond. The kids are perfectly happy to not have their parents looking out for them and seem to be taking care of things just fine. That is until the hurricane hits and then the parents seem more like chickens with their heads cut off with no practical way to keep them all safe. A transition of power takes place and the kids take control. The narrator is a teenage girl who is practically the only parent her young brother has ever known. Evie's brother and his deaf friend, both budding naturalists, spend the time reading a children's bible and relate these religious stories to nature and what is going on around them. It is a book of juxtapositions - the kid's wisdom vs. the parent's ineptitude, nature's beauty vs. nature's wrath and fighting for what you believe in vs. self medicating and giving up. Lydia Millet's brilliant prose speaks about so many key issues that it is difficult to shelve it into one genre. Family relationships , coming of age, climate change and post-apocalyptic survival and religion are all represented and dissected.