The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker narrated by, Emily
Janice Card (Also available in e-book)
Synopsis:Luminous, haunting, unforgettable, The Age of Miracles is a
stunning fiction debut by a superb new writer, a story about coming of age
during extraordinary times, about people going on with their lives in an era of
profound uncertainty.
On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb,
11-year-old Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the
world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and
nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown
into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape,
Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life--the fissures
in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first
love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government
conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia
adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.
With spare, graceful prose and the emotional wisdom of a
born storyteller, Karen Thompson Walker has created a singular narrator in
Julia, a resilient and insightful young girl, and a moving portrait of family
life set against the backdrop of an utterly altered world.
My Review
This was an intriguing first novel; the authors imagination
is pretty amazing, the way she describes the things that were happening to the
world were frightening real. This story is beautifully written and is a slow
boil with no running around trying to save the world, there is nothing to run
from or run to, it is just living in a mixed up world where days and nights
have become confused and the earth has slowed and is de-magnetizing/losing
gravity. Just to go on trying to live your life when everything has changed but
these changes are not seen and only sometimes felt. As she says it’s not that
there are explosions or war or rioting in the streets, the world is not on fire
it is just quietly changing.
“Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”
― Karen Thompson
Walker, The Age of Miracles
This is such a different dystopian because it’s well, quiet,
is the only word I can come up with, it is a quiet dystopian, yes that
describes it. And even as that I was enthralled with this book I didn’t want to
stop listening I wanted to know what happened next. It ended just as quietly
and it was a satisfying ending.
I don’t know how old Julia was supposed to be (listening on
audio must have missed it) but I thought Emily Janice Card did a good job at
the narration she made her sound not too young or too old. Her narration was
very well done.
4 Stars
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