A bleak and righteously angry tale determined to challenge our rationalizations about climate change.
A group of children are forced to fend for themselves in the face of rising sea levels, worsening storms, and willfully ignorant parents.
This somber novel by Millet (Fight No More, 2018, etc.) is a Lord of the Flies–style tale with a climate-fiction twist. Evie, the narrator, is one of a group of kids and teenagers spending a summer with their parents at a lakeside rental mansion that’s pitched as a vacation retreat but increasingly feels like a bulwark against increasingly intense weather on the coasts. The parents’ chief activity involves stockpiling alcohol, leaving their children to explore the area. When a massive storm hits, the parents double down on self-medicating (“during the night the older generation had dosed itself with Ecstasy”) while the kids explore further, ultimately arriving at a farm that’s well stocked, at least for a while. The novel takes some time to find its footing, introducing a host of characters who are initially difficult to differentiate, but it ultimately settles on Evie and her rising fury at the grown-ups’ incapacity to rise to a challenge and her younger brother, Jack, who’s become increasingly obsessed with a Bible he’s received and whether it can serve as a climate change survival handbook. (At one point he attempts to gather up animals, Noah-like.) Millet’s allegorical messages are simple: The next generation will have to clean up (or endure) the climate mess prior ones created, and any notion that we can simply spend our way to higher ground is a delusion. Millet presses that last point in the novel’s latter pages as the brief peace of the farm is disrupted in often horrific fashion. In the process, Jack’s Bible plays an allegorical role too: Can we maintain civilization as we know it when the world descends into Old Testament–style chaos?
A bleak and righteously angry tale determined to challenge our rationalizations about climate change.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00503-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
