"The Age of Miracles" Review

The Age of Miracles

By Karen Thompson Walker

9/10

My Synopsis:

Julia is eleven.  Eleven is a tough age.  She is barely still a kid but not yet a teen.  Difficult enough but add to that “the slowing”.  It happened one Saturday.  Scientists discovered that the rotation of the earth had slowed considerably.  At first it just seems odd – longer days and longer nights.  But there is more to it.  Soon the days are dark, the nights are light.  Gravity is affected.  The country is divided into those who go by “real time” and those who go by “clock time”.  Plants die.  Food and energy become luxuries.  People’s ability to control their impulses seem affected as well.  In additional to the struggle of being eleven, Julia is dealing with all of these things thanks to “the slowing”.  Will life on earth be changed forever?  Are the things that are happening around her due to “the slowing” or would they happen anyway?  What will happen to Julia?

My Opinion:

Kudos to the author Karen Thompson Walker!  The concept for this book is magnificent!  She has taken something so simple and demonstrated how it could majorly affect humanity as we know it.  The voice of Julia is written very well.  Her struggles in dealing with everyday life – hard enough being a tween, now even harder because of what is happening with the Earth – are captivating.  Your heart just melts as she tries to salvage old friendships and make new friends.  You get to relive that feeling of first love as she longs for her crush, Seth Moreno, to acknowledge her.  I never once felt like I was reading an adult writing as a child.  I felt I was reading what the child herself wrote.  The author’s originality with the changes the Earth is undergoing are amazing.  The whole thing could actually happen and shows us that we should not take for granted what we have and assume that it will always be there.  Her descriptions of how life is changing are eye-opening.  Her use of words to illustrate what is one minute panic and the next minute normal routine is superb.  I almost cried at one point and wondered how can there still be so many pages left when this appears to be the climax?  Which leads me to the one weak point.  The only thing that I didn’t like about this book was most of the last chapter.  See, the rest of the book is so good and so engrossing that it feels like the end is rushed.  After all the lovely descriptions and emotions, the end felt clinical and mandatory for lack of a better term.  I did love the final paragraph though.   A wonderful read with that one minor flaw.  9/10