A review by wileyacez
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

4.0

It's been a very long time since a book got such a grip on me. The story is tied to the Earth's rotation suddenly slowing drastically. The narrator is an eleven-year-old girl at the time. What seemed to resonate with me the most were the passages about dealing with abnormally long days and nights. At this time of the summer, the days are so long and it's always time for bed before the sky is even fully dark. Somehow the descriptions of trying to sleep during full daylight touched on something very familiar. I found it terribly difficult to put the darn thing down! The rest of the story--parents struggling through marital troubles, an elderly grandfather struggling to find a reason to continue living, and fledgling love that is more friendship than passion--was pretty convincingly done. The story is very localized; it's not about what happens on a global scale (and it doesn't need to be). The idea that humanity's time on this planet is someday going to come to an end--that ever-lurking fear that we all have to live with--was well expressed.