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A review by bookwormtrish
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
2.0
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.