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kblincoln 's review for:
The Age of Miracles
by Karen Thompson Walker
4.5 stars, actually.
This book is a slow burn. Even though its about Catastrophes (both global and personal) and the surviving of them, don't look for any last minute heroics or scientific breakthroughs-- this is all about the ways we survive on a day to day basis, slowly adjusting to the terrible things around us.
Julia lives in Southern California, so she's no stranger to the ways the Earth can shake things up. But even Julia and her family aren't ready for the gradual slowing of the rotation of the Earth, and the lengthening days and nights, off-balance magnetic fields, and dying birds.
The world's governments deal with this catastrophe piecemeal, reacting with "clock time" when the days lengthen too far, giving up on the astronauts trapped in the space station, and turning off all nonessential power so that dwindling energy can be used for UV lamps to grow food.
Meanwhile, Julia is dealing with personal catastrophes of her own in the same, slow-reacting way. She's lost her best friend to Mormon retreat, her grandfather's disappeared, and her parents are falling away from each other. And there's this boy, Seth, she keeps blurting out awkward things to.
For me, the slow death of society as we know it was tied up with the emotional and social awkwardness of Julila's personality. All the catastrophes play out in a slow, sad, downward spiral. It's the small details of Julia's mother buying emergency peanut butter, and 'real timers' abandoning society for supposed Utopias in the desert, and the social perils of waiting for the school bus in the dark that layer together a delicious, slice-of-near future-dystopia life for the reader to enjoy.
It doesn't quite make the 5th star for me because the pace slowed down just a bit too much for me sometimes, and I felt like the promise of several characters (and their ultimate fates) were never quite fully fulfilled or explained.
Still, my 6th grader said she enjoyed the book as well. (Romancey bits are quite tame). For a literary-flavored near future meditation on weathering emotional and global catastrophes, this is your book.
This book is a slow burn. Even though its about Catastrophes (both global and personal) and the surviving of them, don't look for any last minute heroics or scientific breakthroughs-- this is all about the ways we survive on a day to day basis, slowly adjusting to the terrible things around us.
Julia lives in Southern California, so she's no stranger to the ways the Earth can shake things up. But even Julia and her family aren't ready for the gradual slowing of the rotation of the Earth, and the lengthening days and nights, off-balance magnetic fields, and dying birds.
The world's governments deal with this catastrophe piecemeal, reacting with "clock time" when the days lengthen too far, giving up on the astronauts trapped in the space station, and turning off all nonessential power so that dwindling energy can be used for UV lamps to grow food.
Meanwhile, Julia is dealing with personal catastrophes of her own in the same, slow-reacting way. She's lost her best friend to Mormon retreat, her grandfather's disappeared, and her parents are falling away from each other. And there's this boy, Seth, she keeps blurting out awkward things to.
For me, the slow death of society as we know it was tied up with the emotional and social awkwardness of Julila's personality. All the catastrophes play out in a slow, sad, downward spiral. It's the small details of Julia's mother buying emergency peanut butter, and 'real timers' abandoning society for supposed Utopias in the desert, and the social perils of waiting for the school bus in the dark that layer together a delicious, slice-of-near future-dystopia life for the reader to enjoy.
It doesn't quite make the 5th star for me because the pace slowed down just a bit too much for me sometimes, and I felt like the promise of several characters (and their ultimate fates) were never quite fully fulfilled or explained.
Still, my 6th grader said she enjoyed the book as well. (Romancey bits are quite tame). For a literary-flavored near future meditation on weathering emotional and global catastrophes, this is your book.