A Children's Bible

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-7

Chapters 8-10

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 3-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary

As the group’s boats approach the great house, Evie is relieved to be “home,” and looks forward to exploring the nearby fields and forests and swimming in the lake. However, the parents are nailing plywood over the windows, filling buckets with water, and making frantic supply runs before the storm; but none of the adults raises the possibility of leaving for higher ground. As Evie enters the parlor, her mother, crouched in front of the liquor cabinet as before an “altar,” ignores her and purchases large quantities of alcohol over the phone. Searching outside for Jack, Evie sees Kay and Amy fighting over a doll. Kay hits her twin sister over the head with a stone, knocking her out. Evie carries Amy’s “limp body” inside to the twins’ mother. The paramedics arrive and manage to revive Amy. Looking for Jack, Evie opens a pantry and finds David, the group’s tech-whiz, who guiltily tells Evie that he sabotaged the yacht’s navigation system with a virus. Now he worries that the yacht will never reach Newport. Evie finds Jack and Shel and asks the boys to return to the house, but Jack says they have “important” work to do. Evie tells Alycia’s father that Alycia is on the luxury yacht. Later, Alycia’s parents burst in with the frantic news that the Coast Guard has received a distress signal from the yacht Cobra.

Evie notices that her parents have been taking the storm seriously because they have not drunk alcohol for at least two hours. Jack worriedly tells Evie that the basement boiler room is now full of bees because he and Shel have brought the neighbor’s beehives inside . Late at night, the storm knocks out the power out and drives a massive branch through the attic window. Downstairs, a willow tree has fallen into the house, destroying part of the roof. The lake has flooded and is lapping at the sides of the house. Most of the teenagers are ordered outside to assist the adults in the slapdash patching of holes. Val is sent up to help fix the roof in the midst of a lightning storm.

The improvised repairs quickly give way to more torrents of rain. While the teenagers obey a mother’s wild call to secure the boats, the adults indulge in a variety of drugs. Two snort cocaine, while another has fallen into a stupor, and many others lose themselves in marijuana. The stoned fathers blearily blame the disaster on “capitalism.” Evie retrieves the kids’ confiscated cell phones from the wall safe. As evening falls, the storm continues, and the kids decide to sleep on the lower floor. Evie, Jen, and David go outside to round up the younger boys and discover that Jack and Shel have moved into the treehouses; they have also brought their boxes of wild animals. Jack says, “We have to save the animals. Like Noah did” (70), and refuses to leave the treehouse.

Chapter 4 Summary

Evie and Jen have no choice but to stay in the treehouse to look after their younger brothers. Their cell phones have signals, and they learn about the “coastal flood” that has killed many and has filled the region with a “toxic soup” of polluted water. In the morning, Jack shows Evie his many rescued animals. Soon, the five of them are joined by Rafe, Terry, Dee, Low, and Juicy, who have fled the house to escape the “repulsive” antics of the parents. The adults have given up trying to repair the house; they are now high on Ecstasy and are having sex in the common areas. The stormy weather continues overnight. After the rain stops, it takes three days for the “poison lake” to recede. On the first day, a seaplane with pontoons lands and returns Alycia to her parents. She tells them that the Cobra survived the storm. Kay is found hunched in the fishing shed, but Amy remains missing. On the third day, the kids find an unconscious “small man” named Burl who has weathered the storm on an inflatable raft. Jack likens him to Moses, who as a baby was discovered in the reeds of the Nile. Evie and the other kids avoid their parents, who continue to lose themselves in drugs and alcohol.

That night, Burl and Val discover a strange bush that is teeming with mosquitoes. Burl advises the kids to leave the area because a mosquito-born “plague” may be coming. They begin planning an exodus, with Burl as one of the drivers; their parents, still disoriented by their Ecstasy binge, are left out of the planning. Some of the kids question whether an unhoused person like Burl can lead them to safety, but Burl insists that he is a groundskeeper.

Jack keeps trying to relate events to Bible stories and gets into an argument with Sukey, who does not believe the Bible should be taken literally. Jack claims that the Bible is a “code,” and that God represents nature. The kids load Jack’s rescued animals into a van; Burl agrees to drive them to a 10-room mansion owned by Juicy’s parents. The kids explain the plan to their parents, but despite the ruined state of the rented house and the surrounding area, the parents listlessly refuse to leave, believing that they would then be liable for exorbitant repair fees. The kids prepare to leave. Burl expertly navigates the van, which is filled to capacity with children and animals, while a few parents try to give chase. The kids have taken the precaution of hiding the parents’ car keys, the location of which they will text to them later.

Chapter 5 Summary

After only 20 minutes on the road, fallen trees and powerlines force the exodus to reroute. Burl knows of a nearby farm out of range of flooding and mosquitoes. It belongs to a rich lady, a “hobby famer” for whom he does maintenance work, who lives in TriBeCa. Before long, they reach the farm, which looks picturesque and well-situated, with a barn, silo, cottage. There are no fallen trees or standing water. Three donkeys graze in the field, along with six or seven goats, and a fenced-in garden grows corn, kale, and chard. There are also a couple of electric all-terrain vehicles, and a generator behind the cottage that allows the children to recharge their phones. Their phone signals are weak, but they are able to read news reports about the widespread devastation of the storms and flooding, which has wreaked havoc in New York, Boston, and beyond. They realize that this is a new kind of climate event. There are also reports of riots and looting on a massive scale. Evie feels grateful to Burl for finding them a safe place.

Hearing a car horn, Evie steps out of the cottage to find Sukey’s “fat” mother, who has tracked them to the farm, but Sukey refuses to return to the rented house. Her mother continues to yell at her, claiming that she and the other parents are “worried” about them, which surprises the kids. Suddenly, her water breaks, and the kids realize that her seeming obesity is actually a late-stage pregnancy. Sukey angrily gets into her mother’s car to drive her back to the great house. Burl comes in with the news that he has been to a nearby “hill” where phone reception is strong, and that he has spoken to the farm’s owner. She has given him 1- “rules” for living on her property; these rules closely mirror the Bible’s Ten Commandments.

Soon, a text on David’s phone informs the children that their parents are coming down with a “fever,” presumably from the mosquitoes. David’s mother warns them not to come back to the great house: a rare “selfless gesture” on her part. That night, the sky lights up with magnificent, rippling waves of green and purple: the aurora borealis. It is a very rare sight for their region, and Evie wonders how many humans will be alive to witness such sights in the future; she then tells herself to stop worrying and be grateful for being alive.

Chapters 3-5 Analysis

In this section of the novel, the instances religious imagery and symbolism proliferate, highlighting the author’s broader goal of Satirizing Society Through Biblical Allegory. Even the more mundane elements evoke the trappings of a church, for Evie daydreams of running through a “long arch” of graceful trees that suggests a cathedral, and once inside the rental house, she finds her mother kneeling before the “altar” of the liquor cabinet, genuflecting to the false gods of “bourbon, sherry, vodka, and vermouth” (51). Thus, Millet draws heavy-handed contrasts between the children and their parents to illustrate Variable Reactions to Disaster. The children’s respect for nature and constructive approach to problem-solving also render them far more competent than the intoxicated adults, who increasingly resemble the decadent, godless “sinners” who drew God’s wrath in the time of Noah. Jack underscores this analogy by consciously imitating Noah and collecting animals to rescue. Likewise, just as the sinners in Genesis were caught unaware by the Great Flood, the clique of parents make no effective preparations to survive the coming storm. Their attempts to weatherproof the house prove to be scattershot at best, and their continual neglect of their children borders on the criminal.

In addition to the flood imagery, Millet also invokes the cautionary tale of Cain and Abel in the increasingly bitter fights between the twins, Kay and Amy. Similarly, the tech-savvy David, who did not know about the storm when he tampered with the Cobra’s GPS, wallows in guilt, just like the biblical King David did after putting Uriah the Hittite in harm’s way. The fact that the Cobra can serve simultaneously as symbols for the Serpent, Goliath, and Uriah foregrounds Millet’s playful use of biblical allusion. Thus, the various meanings in A Children’s Bible are always shifting, and Millet gets quite a bit of mileage out of each symbol, especially as the flood comparisons intensify. Like Noah and his crew, most of the children rise to the occasion, outfitting their makeshift “ark” in the treehouses with tarps and tents. The adults, by contrast, sink ever deeper into apathy and intoxication, and their decadence culminates in an Ecstasy-fueled semi-orgy that turns the great house into a miniature version of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Significantly, when the floodwaters recede, the biblical allusions quickly shift to images of the Exodus, for Jack immediately compares the raft-born Burl to Moses in the bulrushes, and these events precipitate the children’s departure from the rented house despite their parents’ vaguely pharaoh-like role of refusing to let them go. It is at this moment that the author chooses to reveal her broader message, for Jack openly suggests that the Bible is a network of symbols with eternal relevance. The idea that God represents nature itself takes on a much deeper meaning, given that Burl can “read” nature just as Moses could commune with God. As one of the very few responsible adults in the novel, the modest, altruistic Burl offers a stark contrast with the kids’ narcissistic parents, whose highly specialized, career-oriented knowledge is all but useless in an emergency.

Appropriately, it is therefore Burl, the symbolic Moses, who leads the kids’ exodus from the great house, plowing through “waves” of “rust-red” water in a scene that is meant to echo Moses’s parting of the Red Sea. He even drives them to a farm whose resources make it a literal “land of milk and honey,” and he presents the kids with the owner’s 10 rules just as Moses spoke with God on Mount Sinai and received the Ten Commandments. Meanwhile, the parents, who still symbolize the Egyptians in this Mosaic parable, come down with a “plague” in the form of dengue fever. Their resistance to the kids’ plans also represents the ongoing issue of Generational Conflict and Social Responsibility that pervade the novel; despite the parents’ supposed position of authority, their lack of initiative and escapist qualities render them far less capable than their children of facing up to the current realities of the world.

However, Millet quickly abandons Old Testament references to hurry toward New Testament events, and the appearance of a spectacular aurora borealis is meant to evoke the biblical Star of Bethlehem that heralded Jesus’s birth. The practical-minded Burl does not see this event as a “sign” for anything, but, coincidentally or not, a birth in a manger lies just ahead, when Sukey returns with her mother. Ironically, these parallels with the biblical Advent are not greeted as new beginnings, but rather as an end, for Evie wonders if they will be among the last humans to see such lights in the sky. A Children’s Bible therefore suggests that in the human mind signs and portents continually repeat themselves, until finally it is too late, and no one is left to see them.