Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.62 AVERAGE
3.62 AVERAGE
Wow. This book is Wow. It was one of of those books where I got so invested that I couldn't believe this wasn't real life. After the book, I was waiting for days to lengthen and crops to burn and everyone to panic! It is so realistic, so well done and a story that is so outrageously far fetched it could happen. It was a truly "mind blown" feeling. I'm pretty sure this is a YA novel, but hey, I must be a young adult! Recommended to anyone that wants a quick read, good story, and something that makes you think.
I've introduced this to my fifth and sixth graders and they are all about it. The perception of the world changing, and also a tiny love story and coming-of-age tale for students....I'm baffled by Walker's prose and her weaving of an interesting tale for all ages.
I've introduced this to my fifth and sixth graders and they are all about it. The perception of the world changing, and also a tiny love story and coming-of-age tale for students....I'm baffled by Walker's prose and her weaving of an interesting tale for all ages.
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
dark
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Wonderful. Gets really good at about page 130 - too much obvious foreshadowing at the beginning. Believable narrator is a young woman whose awkward adolescence parallels the unknown future of a slowed down earth. Hints at believing in science vs religion and what happens when what we know about science starts to fall apart.
One of the best books I have read! Completely gripping and enchanting. I loved the main character and her path through the book. A coming of age book with a twist...the world is turning slower and slower and life is becoming harder. Great read, can't wait for Karen Thompson Walker to write another book!
A beautifully written, poetic, apocalyptic story of adolescence. The "age of miracles" in the title refers to adolescence, which is a lovely way to think of those years, but the slow crumbling of our world is the end of all miracles. I really do love these two genres more than any others (coming-of-age fiction written for adults+end-of-the-world science fiction) and I thought this one would top all others, but honestly, Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer is to me a more exciting and terrifying look at the same type of scenario from a teenage girl's point of view. This book was lovely, but the other just had a sense of realism that this one didn't.
I don’t think I would have appreciated this book as much as I did if it was not for what happened in 2020. It was interesting to see the parallels of how people react to great change and the unknown.
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker is the sort of book that I desperately want to love, but can’t quite bring myself to embrace wholeheartedly. It has an intensely promising start which eventually fizzles out into an empty nothingness which leaves me wondering what exactly is the point of it all. But perhaps that itself is the message Walker is trying to convey, for after all this is a novel about the end of the world, and if you can’t find hopelessness and resignation there, where else can you find it?
Sorry for the spoilers – I usually try to avoid them, but I don’t know quite how else to talk about this book. If I only focus on the first few chapters, you might expect that our heroine will find some miraculous way to fix everything and save the earth. Instead, she goes about the business of growing up while the earth is slowing down in a sort of apocalyptic coming-of-age story where she is leaving behind not only childhood, but life itself.
The writing itself is solid on both the speculative fiction and the young adult fronts. The description of what happens as the earth’s rotation slows unfolds for the reader just as for the inhabitants of the planet and is fascinatingly complex as it ranges from the physical effects on the flora and fauna of the world all the way to the psychological and sociological changes undergone by the people living through it. At the same time, Julia is facing the challenges of any girl approaching adolescence, although she wonders how much the strange events are affecting her situation:
"It seems to me that the slowing triggered certain other changes too, less visible at first but deeper….But who am I to say that the course of my childhood was not already set long before the slowing? Perhaps my adolescence was only an average adolescence, the stinging a quite unremarkable stinging….Maybe everything that happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much."
I have to say that on re-reading the book, I appreciate it much more than I did at first. On the initial read-through, I was so focused on the science fiction aspect of the book and on finding on what was going to happen to them all that I didn’t pay as much attention to what Julia was going through internally. Knowing the ending of the story allowed me to go back and read it with a better awareness that it is really more about how people deal with change and uncertainty, even the kind that may not signal the end of the world. So while I still can’t say I love it, there’s something about it that I can’t get out of my head.
Sorry for the spoilers – I usually try to avoid them, but I don’t know quite how else to talk about this book. If I only focus on the first few chapters, you might expect that our heroine will find some miraculous way to fix everything and save the earth. Instead, she goes about the business of growing up while the earth is slowing down in a sort of apocalyptic coming-of-age story where she is leaving behind not only childhood, but life itself.
The writing itself is solid on both the speculative fiction and the young adult fronts. The description of what happens as the earth’s rotation slows unfolds for the reader just as for the inhabitants of the planet and is fascinatingly complex as it ranges from the physical effects on the flora and fauna of the world all the way to the psychological and sociological changes undergone by the people living through it. At the same time, Julia is facing the challenges of any girl approaching adolescence, although she wonders how much the strange events are affecting her situation:
"It seems to me that the slowing triggered certain other changes too, less visible at first but deeper….But who am I to say that the course of my childhood was not already set long before the slowing? Perhaps my adolescence was only an average adolescence, the stinging a quite unremarkable stinging….Maybe everything that happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much."
I have to say that on re-reading the book, I appreciate it much more than I did at first. On the initial read-through, I was so focused on the science fiction aspect of the book and on finding on what was going to happen to them all that I didn’t pay as much attention to what Julia was going through internally. Knowing the ending of the story allowed me to go back and read it with a better awareness that it is really more about how people deal with change and uncertainty, even the kind that may not signal the end of the world. So while I still can’t say I love it, there’s something about it that I can’t get out of my head.
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
sad
medium-paced