A Children’s Bible

It was risky of the author to give her book this title. Type "Children's Bible" into Google to see. Poor cookies, they must be all mixed up right now.

Summary

A dozen children whose parents are old friends meet at a large cottage to spend the summer. The kids despise their parents, wealthy middle-class people who get drunk at cocktail parties to pass the time, avoid them and find all sorts of ways to annoy them. With varying degrees of success, it seems. The parents are in a kind of constant torpor and don't really care what the children do. They then go to spend a few days on an island, far from any authority. A few days before the apocalypse.

Impressions

I had written this book down at least a year ago. The author of the review I had read, I can't remember where, said the ending was so great she wished she had written it. So I read this book quite a bit for the ending. I couldn't wait for it to end, but for the right reasons.

Turns out the ending was pretty lame in my opinion (the kind that would require a good hour of thought and analysis, which I don't want to do), but what led up to it was highly entertaining. I couldn't see the time pass when I was immersed in this book. Everything is weird: the parents are big larvae, the kids are a little cruel and oddly mature for their age, and once the apocalypse comes, the events are so unpredictable that I was in a constant state of surprise. I'm not the best at predicting what will happen next in a story. But still.

There are clearly a lot of references to the Bible, some of which are obvious enough for me to notice (the narrator's name is Eve, her little brother saves all kinds of animals from a big flood, he reads the Bible, there are three "angels", etc.), and surely a lot of others that could be fun to decipher. But honestly, I could have done without it, that wasn't the important thing.

I had a lot of fun with it. It was easy to read, it was very strange and a little scary, but also quite funny. I think I laughed? I'm not sure. I don't know what I would have laughed at. But when I think of this book, I smile.