Before you get confused, no, this is not about religion. I mean, it is, but it’s more like The Color Purple type religion, where it’s more about nature as a religion.
I actually really liked this book. Obviously the title was incredibly interesting, and I read the premise and thought, huh, kids against parents and rebellion? Sounds like all those Disney films. And then I started the book and boy was I wrong.
Essentially, this is a book about a group of 12 kids (honestly I had to get that from the premise; I didn’t actually count the kids) and their parents, who are on a vacation when the world goes to pieces and how they all survive this. Even in the beginning, I thought this plot was interesting, because you see kids hating their parents often, but you don’t often see kids hating their parents for good reason. And then you have these parents, who quite literally have nothing on their minds except drugs, sex, and alcohol. I mean, they literally have an orgy a few days after the storm breaks the house that they’re all vacationing in. And you don’t often have kids who actually, truly, despise their parents. These kids really are ashamed of who their parents are, but there’s also this underlying fear that they’re going to become their parents one day, and that just makes them hate them even more. (“They were a cautionary tale.” pg 13) The kids are also playing a game where they don’t tell each other whose parents are whose, and so the first half of the book has this underlying game running through it.
Then the book takes a turn for the darker, and jesus, was I not expecting that. First of all, you have the parents deciding that they don’t care if the kids run off (I mean it, it was in the middle of a storm and the parents decided to get drunk, so the kids literally left with this stranger and no parent went out to chase them). Then you have the world going to pieces completely because of this storm and kind of Purge like lawlessness while we’re at it, so the kids are held at gunpoint and certain people are tortured (not the kids, don’t worry). And then you have the kids finding the parents (more them rescuing the adults than the adults rescuing them), and the story ends in a way that is truly shocking to a person who has been raised in our society.
So yeah. That was a rollercoaster, and honestly? I loved it. It was amazing, the book kept me on my toes, the writing was superb, and the characters all felt important to me. I cared about them. Less so about the parents, who didn’t have characteristics honestly beyond simply being a group of mindless zombies with cool jobs here and there, but that was purposeful, because when you’re looking at them through the perspective of the kids, they were entirely just one big blob of sad, old people. I loved Sukey, Jack, and I had mixed feelings about Eve, mostly because as a narrator and a loner by nature, she doesn’t actually comment much about her own personal feelings, usually just relaying what’s going on to the reader. I will say that the first few pages, when she says something about how the deer might see humans as evil, when the deer asks the human who they are and what they are, and how sometimes the humans tell the deer that what they are is dead, that scene really hit me somewhere in my black, philosophical, dead heart.
I also really do admire the themes of discussing religion in this? I don’t adhere to any particular religion and I don’t know if I particularly like organized religion as a system, but I do think that Jack’s firm belief that the Bible is a metaphor and God is nature and Jesus is science actually makes a lot of sense for an atheist.
There’s also this scene towards the end of the book when the kids tell the parents that they understand why the parents have completely lost their mind, that the parents have lived their entire lives in a system that has now collapsed so it makes sense that they don’t know what to do, that hit me hard. This is why I study sociology, because what are we if not the systems that we adhere to? Are we really trying to get rid of systems, or are we actually just brainless zombies without these systems? And the lines about the parents losing themselves, losing their personalities and simply disappearing? I loved this book.
I think I’ll need more time to truly digest it, but wow if some of these lines and these kids didn’t make me rethink my entire existence.
Would recommend to everyone.10 out of 10. Loved this.
Happy Saturday!!
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