A Children's Bible

I loved this audiobook. An intriguing and thought provoking story and beautifully written would highly recommend.

I can’t decide if releasing a speculative fiction novel about a pandemic during a pandemic is the best marketing ever or the worst.

Personally, I didn’t particularly care for it. And do I need to add a pandemic trigger warning to this? I long for the days of 6 months ago when no such question would have even occurred to me.

But pandemic or not, the review must go on.

The Children’s Bible has its moments. The humor is quite good for the most part, as are many of the wry observations made by our child protagonists about their parents and adults in general.

Mostly though, the book tries to be too many things. It’s a pandemic novel! It’s a climate change cautionary tale! It’s a really weird spin on Lord of the Flies! It’s a biblical parallel!

The Lord of the Flies thing kind of worked. The biblical parallel didn’t. The pandemic stuff is unfortunately just too on the nose at the moment (no blame placed on the author for that one though. I doubt she saw COVID-19 coming when she wrote this).

There’s some cleverness to the book’s bent on climate change, but mostly it’s nothing new and it gets lost in the sea of other subjects the book tries to address.

This is a better book than Sweet Lamb of Heaven (hey, at least she used a real disease this time!), but ultimately the ambition of it far exceeds the execution.

The narrator for the audiobook turned out to be a pleasant surprise. She has a pleasant, almost understated melodic sound, which I worried wouldn’t hold my attention, but once settled in I found I quite liked her, and felt that her lack of sharpness in tone suited the book very well.

I was excited for this one after seeing it on the National Book Award longlist. But I may have realized the books that the critics love aren't my thing. Like Leave the World behind, it was beautifully written, but not much happened. And because it reminded me of that book so much, and I didn't love that one, I chose to DNF this one 60% through. I'm sure others will love it, it's just not for me.

Weird, eerie, highly symbolic and unique science fiction novel - perfect for these odd times we're in.

I'm not usually one to read science fiction, but lately with the pandemic and the spooky Halloween season it's all I've been craving A Children's Bible immediately spoke to me with its outrageous plot: twelve children decide to run away from their immature, neglecting parents during a lakeside vacation... during an apocalyptic storm. This get even weirder when the conditions outside look just like the events from the Bible, which one of the kids carries around.

The story follows the children through the narrative of Eve, basically a leader of the group. This was mind-blowing to me because we know that Eve is just a child, thus making for an interesting/unreliable narrator of such a dangerous and serious expedition. But what's more, she uses a plural pronoun "we", reminiscent of the Bible and the cult-like group victim to their horrible parents, giving me such spooky vibes I couldn't shake it off.

Finally, I would highly recommend the audiobook version of this novel. The narrator does a really good job pronouncing all the emotions and keeping up with the spooky vibe of this book, making it a special experience for me.

*Thank you to the Publisher for a free advance copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

A group of college friends rent a huge old mansion for the summer. Their 12 children play a game of hiding their parents’ identity from each other and demonstrate great distain for their parents. These are parents unrivaled in all of literature, except perhaps by those in The Glass Castle. A storm of apocalyptic force informs the action and it’s the kids who take charge, fleeing to safety. There’s so much in this book. It’s a quick unputdownable novel that reads like Lord of the Flies.

I was very intrigued by this story and it certainly was interesting. It is a sort of dystopian, apocalyptic story. A group of parents and children are vacationing together and the parents are the worst and basically neglect there kids. And then all sorts of strange things happen that seem to be somewhat connect to a children's Bible one of the characters is carrying around. It is a really critical look at the parents and the kids are all quite impressive. The symbolism runs deep in the story. I listened to the audio version and I am not sure if I really cared for the narrator. The voice sounded so detached from all that was happen. Not my favorite narration, but the story was certainly interesting.

I’m not sure how I feel about A Children’s Bible. The story wasn’t my favorite, but the writing was beautiful. I did enjoy the narrator a great deal and thought she added so much to the story. I just don’t think this one is for me. It’s a dystopian novel that does seem to be examining our current culture but it just fell short for me. I think some would love it, so I would recommend.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dreamscape media for the opportunity to listen to the audiobook.