A Children's Bible

Eve and eleven other children spend a strained summer with their families at a rented lakeside mansion. The parents drink and drift through the days while a storm builds outside. The children are older than their years and openly contemptuous of the adults. They keep mostly to themselves until a hurricane tears through the estate and wrecks the world they knew.

When the storm passes, Eve and the other older kids lead the group out into flooding, blackouts and wreckage. Eve takes on the job of protecting her younger brother, who carries an illustrated picture Bible everywhere he goes. As the disaster outside starts to echo the stories in his book, Eve reads the resemblance as more than coincidence.

Millet sets a climate catastrophe against a family drama. The children's disdain for their parents frames a wider failure of one generation to protect the next. She blends crude teenage humor with biblical imagery, moving between the two without settling into either register for long.

The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and was named one of the New York Times' ten best books of 2020.