The Age of Miracles

by Karen Thompson Walker
4 out of 5 stars

I never wanted to write up a review that said “this book really affected me,” but this book did, so I guess I’ll have to suck it up and admit that I found (and find) myself thinking about it at odd times. Like when I notice it’s still daylight when I leave work, or gas jumps up $.20 in a day, or I hear about whales getting lost. I’m reminded of this story. 

Actually, what this book reminds me of, more than anything, is “…it’s never the disasters you see coming that finally come to pass; it’s the ones you don’t expect at all.” 

Amen, sister. And by sister, I mean the pint-sized protagonist, Julia, who at 11 is trying to make sense of a world that’s slowing down. Literally. In this Age of Miracles, the earth has suddenly started spinning more slowly, resulting in the gradual (well, actually rapid) increase in time as we know it. More specifically, 60+-hour days and a whole bunch of consequences nobody really thought about ‘til now. Like gravity increasing, all kinds of climate change and environmental disarray, solar storms, a fissured atmosphere that leaks radiation, and the loss of all sorts of things we take for granted: lawns, birds, bananas, electricity and physics. 

The chaos we might expect – panic, hoarding, and general freaking out – takes a back seat to Julia’s own issues and observations (the boy she has a crush on, mean girls, her father’s seeming infidelity with her piano teacher, and going to school in the dark), which in turn makes the potential for a dystopian downer much more palatable. 

The foreshadowing in this book is a little heavy and, I felt, never really delivered. But I still enjoyed the storytelling and the thought provoking study (in which you do your own studying) on human nature and how something like this might really play out. Also kind of fascinating (to me) is how society almost immediately becomes divided into those who continue to live by a 24-hour clock and those who don’t, and how fragile the economy probably is…though I hope we never find out.