2/14/24: Reread for Spring 2024 YAL class, sort of in conjunction with Dry by Neil Shusterman, a YA novel, also dystopian about our world set on fire 2/14/24: Reread for Spring 2024 YAL class, sort of in conjunction with Dry by Neil Shusterman, a YA novel, also dystopian about our world set on fire through climate change, and the kids on their own, left with the world we have given them, and what can they do? Millet's book is not a YA book, and is much better written, imo, but both can reach younger audiences with the urgency the topic requires.
Original review, 10/27/22: The Children’s Bible is a kind of dystopian allegory of a near future descending into chaos. Brought on by climate disaster that the kids are aware of more than the adults. The parents are just clueless--wealthy, educated, where “drinking was a form of worship for them. . . they respected two things, drinking and money." Climate change has come quickly to disaster; whoops, there it is, we thought we had more time, shoot! Then chaos, people rioting over food and water, as the parents pair up and “couple” in upstairs bedrooms.
The kids look at all this as they see the world burn. These children--some of whom are also careless jerks in this book--are aware of the sins of their parents; they know that greed, selfishness and general disregard for the planet is destroying their future.
“Do you blame us?” [a mom asks, late in the book] “Oh, we blame you for everything.” [a girl] “Oh, I don’t blame you. . ." [another girl]. The woman smiles gratefully. “I just think you’re stupid, and selfish. When the time came you just did what you always do, whatever you wanted to.”
“When we ran, if we chose to, we ran like flashes of silk. We had the vigor of those freshly born. Relatively speaking. And no, we wouldn’t be like this forever. We knew it, on a rational level. But the idea that those garbage-like figures that tottered around the great house were a vision of what lay in store—hell no. Had they had goals once? A simple sense of self-respect? They shamed us. They were a cautionary tale.”
“It was them and not them, maybe the ones they’d never been. I could almost see those others standing in the garden where the pea plants were, feet planted between the rows. They stood without moving, their faces glowing with some shine a long time gone. A time before I lived. Their arms hung at their sides. They’d always been there, I thought blearily, and they’d always wanted to be more than they were. They should always be thought of as invalids, I saw. Each person, fully grown, was sick or sad, with problems attached to them like broken limbs.”
If you think the parents are painted too broadly, too caricatured, consider that one thread of this pretty amazing, deeply angry and sad book is the darkest of comedy, satirizing adults--who are mostly considering their stock portfolio performance and getting wasted every day at the cocktail hour--from the perspective of the next generation left to clean up the mess. This is a view familiar to anyone growing up in the late sixties, where young people saw the post-WWII generation as racist, sexist, in denial about the environmental disasters that they were creating, pro-Viet Nam War, and so on.
Cue Greta Thunberg as the emblem of environmental responsibility:
and then, in the next slide, you'd want an image of a million adults partying and spending millions in Vegas, or whatever (yes, I saw the Super Bowl and enjoyed the whole billion dollar spectacle with hundred thousand dollar seats, but I take Millet's point here; I'm not sayin' I'm a saint; I crave escapism as antidote to despair, too).
And yes, there are actual deaths and disasters that happen in this book. It's not merely a light satirical joke. Millet is writing climate fiction. She knows what is coming.
What are the narratives of children without adults? Lord of the Flies is a central one, a view that debunks the idea of childhood as Edenic innocence, and instead embraces the Calvinistic notion of total depravity. The kids in Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here periodically spontaneously combust, and recover, and are seen as the victims of upwardly mobile, negligent parents. I am most recalling as I read this novel a short story about neglectful parenting, “Pilgrims,” by Julie Orringer, where adults are so selfishly caught up in sex and drugs in the seventies, leaving the kids alone, and this neglect leads to violence. As with The Children's Bible, this story is a vicious castigation of generations of ignorance leading to catastrophe. And in these stories the adults are not right wing extremists but liberals, stoned-meditating as the kids run wild. Peace, indeed.
I also thought of Nathaniel West’s social chaos in The Day of the Locust. Not quite realism, on the edge of madness. I thought of a pre-meme bumper sticker from the sixties: Never Trust Anyone Over Thirty, or the Who’s "I Hope To Die Before I Get Old" (still alive, old Who guys. . . who? Who!? Can you speak louder, I can’t hear from years of playing this music too loud!). See Meg Rosoff’s YA dystopian How We Live Now. . . and maybe Peter Pan and the Lost Boys?
I didn’t love Millet’s most recent book, Dinosaurs, which might also be categorized as climate fiction. but I loved this one. It has a real edge to it, a sense of rage and despair and absurdity I relate to in it. Climate fiction at its best.
“That time in my personal life, I was coming to grips with the end of the world. The familiar world, anyway. Many of us were. Scientists said it was ending now, philosophers said it had always been ending. Historians said there’d been dark ages before. It all came out in the wash, because eventually, if you were patient, enlightenment arrived and then a wide array of Apple devices. Politicians claimed everything would be fine. Adjustments were being made. Much as our human ingenuity had got us into this fine mess, so would it neatly get us out. Maybe more cars would switch to electric. That was how we could tell it was serious. Because they were obviously lying.”
Ooh, burn (baby, burn).
And the title, The Children's Bible? My sister and I had one of those, growing up. Noah's ark, lots of animals there and in the Garden of Eden. As in this book, where a child carries a Children's Bible around. Always they leave out the Book of Revelation though--too disturbing for kids. I like that moral thread through this book, that threat. Oh, let's read the Psalms and all the happy parts, instead!
Delicious and horrible horror for Halloween at any time....more
Maybe the first environmental book about water that I read was Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1951, read by me first in the seventies, when I alsoMaybe the first environmental book about water that I read was Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1951, read by me first in the seventies, when I also first read Silent Spring), part of a trilogy of books on the sea and one of many about the threats against our environment by the collusion of big biz/politicians that still is very much in place.
I read Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (1986) when it came out, and have been of course reading a lot of books and articles on environmental destruction that maybe still only a third of this country is taking seriously (let’s let the oil barons run a climate change conference, yeah!). Drill, baby, drill, some of our so-called leaders say.
I read Dry (2018) by Neil Shusterman and his son Jarrod, with my spring 2024 YAL course as part of a group of YA cli-fi we are reading. We all read this one and then they could choose one of four others. I liked it, it’s both true to actual events happening in the American southwest (and across the planet) and also a pretty well-written thriller.
The Drought--the Big One--has finally happened, as California and other states are cut off from the Colorado River (the Tap-Out, they call it), after years of extreme droughts have actually taken just about all the remaining water from the whole five or eight(? more?) state area. This is dystopian lit that becomes a thriller as the five kids Alyssa and her younger brother Garrett, prepper neighbor Kelton, junior pro-biz developer Henry (Groyne is his last name, which might make you think of “dick” as a nickname), and alt-girl Jacqui. The point is that they occupy different ideological positions that adults also occupy in the world.
I very much liked the terrifying set-up, the thirst and panic and greed and paranoia and cruelty (and murder), some of which seems to be happening in the southwest now, not in the future. Must we all want to kill each other over diminishing resources and become our own worst selves? Apparently so. I thought it was a pretty straightforward plot, without much complexity once they all got in the car, where the issue becomes narrowed to survival, but it’s a good YA page-turner, though I thought it was more middle-grades level, which is to say the kids all seem very young to me and the plot suddenly becomes simple. But I’m glad it is being read in non-denialist schools and communities. Kids have to see themselves as part of this crisis and not just victims.
I asked my students to find articles online about water scarcity (or floods) in the southwest or globally or the midwest and of course there are thousands, all useful as background. ...more