At first, I found myself disinterested in this book by virtue of its title. I generally don’t take an interest in anything remotely related to religion or Christianity, but after reading the premise of Millet’s book, I was intrigued.
Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects, to me, creative writer that I am, was the use of the first-person plural. It’s a tact that many don’t take and it is difficult to execute well, but its use, coupled with the premise of the story, is unrelentingly engaging.
Friends from college bring their children to a sprawling house by the sea for the summer, locking up the cell phones and tablets, and essentially leaving a group of eight-year-olds to seventeen-year-olds to their own devices whilst they carouse in drunken, drug-induced hedonism. The children, sleeping all together in the attic, find ways to pass the time and govern themselves, trying to avoid the adults as much as possible. The parents, negligent and vaguely aware of their children’s antics, proceed business as usual while their offspring find themselves increasingly horrified by their guardians’ behavior. And then, sh*t hits the fan. Enter apocalypse.
While the story sometimes drips with biblical imagery and allusion to its tales, I did not find it in the least off-putting. Millet approaches it with an ironic air of the bemused observer. Her jaded narrator, Eve, is pragmatic, mature and fiercely protective of her intrepid younger brother.
In the ways that art imitates life, our fiction begins to take on the climate crisis. Millet masterfully manipulates the end-of-the-world archetype into a pleasing and novel form, playing on the excess and contempt of the wealthy (or relatively so) and their children, left to clean up a mess they never asked for. Millet’s story at times borders on the absurd, yet remains amusing for the duration.
At the end of the day, this is a novel that never takes itself too seriously yet still grapples with the troubling themes. Eerily prophetic, it speaks to the anxiety of the times, another cautionary tale of the warming planet.
