A Children’s Bible
My experience with A Children’s Bible pretty much blew my mind. I spent about two-thirds of it hating it/being annoyed by self-absorbed parents willingly unaware of their elite privilege while they drink to oblivion, ignore their children, and swirl around the propped-up world they’ve created full of others like them. To their children, these adults are amorphous and interchangeable and “a cautionary tale.” One child totes around an illustrated children’s Bible which sets the allegorical tone of this novel. One’s not reading A Children’s Bible as a straight-up, literal text – the parents’ debauchery and the children’s ability to completely fend for themselves will give that away. (As will the natural disasters.) So I suppose this Pulitzer finalist tiptoes into “dystopian” territory, which is not really my kind of book.
Let me rewind and share the mindset with which I opened A Children’s Bible: I have a new client who combines mindfulness and outdoor experiences while working with children and families. It’s a simple point, but one he repeats: “The difference between a child who experiences ‘success’ and one who doesn’t is that the ‘successful’ one has hope.” The minute I opened A Children’s Bible, all I kept thinking about was “hope.” Where is it? Do I prefer that the books I read espouse just a sliver of this elusive emotion? Does that mean that I prefer saccharine reads? (No, definitely not, although I feel that my reading did take a more “tidy” turn this year.) I was really on this “hope” bandwagon and had an entire post composed in my head about why we choose what we read and what does it mean to search for “hope” in a text?
And then I read the last chapter. And then the last line. And sorry, but just like a third grader in a book report, “You’ll just have to read it to find out!” (It’s a slim, quick read. I’d love to hear others’ thoughts!)
originally published on instagram