In the End - Amy MacDonald

The Age of Miracles

Author: Karen Thompson Walker
Pages: 288
Publisher: Random House
Source: Random House via NetGalley

Description from Goodreads:
“It still amazes me how little we really knew. . . 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.”

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.

First Sentence: "We didn't notice right away."

Review:
I actually read this over a month ago on the way home from Pittsburgh. Though I generally love long drives, I really wasn't in the mood to do any driving. My dad did end up doing all of the driving, partially because I provided entertainment. After finishing the last few chapters of the book I'd been reading, I let my parents choose from the other books I had along, and then I read the book out loud to them. I finished The Age of Miracles on the drive back to Atlanta.

Reading aloud a book is rather a different reading experience than any other. It's part audiobook, but much more focused than that. It also draws my attention to aspects of the writing I might not have appreciated had I read the book silently. Obviously, I didn't listen to the audiobook, but I suspect it could be really good. My parents enjoyed listening to the book as much as I enjoyed reading it (despite the sore throat).

What reading the book aloud allowed me to fully appreciate was the lovely cadence of Walker's writing. Her book read very smoothly and naturally, but with a somewhat poetic sort of cadence to it. The largely short sentences with some tendency toward repetition might have been a detractor had I been readin the book to myself, but, out loud, I found them simply lovely.

The one issue I had with the writing, one that I feel vaguely nitpicky for even mentioning, was with the way Walker did dialogue. 95% of the time if there was dialogue, it was followed by he said or she said. Most of the other 5% were he/she asked. I get that coming up with other words can be tricky, and this may have been a stylistic decision, but I found it really boring and repetitive to read aloud. Again, this is something I may not have picked up on had I read this the usual way, since I tend to gloss over those.

Much as I enjoyed this book and was seriously fascinated by the concept and consequences of the Earth's slowing rotation, I had some definite suspension of disbelief issues while I was reading this. The thing that gave me the most trouble was accepting that nobody noticed the expansion of the days until they were substantially longer. Not knowing even a theory as to why this might happen was also troublesome, considering that it happened to suddenly and so drastically. I could have accepted a gradual slow down without explanation, but would expect something cataclysmic to result in such a dramatic, quick change.

Moving past that, though, I found, as I always do, the vision of society trying to cope utterly captivating. I did have some more disbelief issues in that things mostly seemed to be going TOO well. Still, it was interesting to see how non-dystopian this was, with the governments actually doing their best to keep the crisis as manageable as possible. The Age of Miracles is very firmly post-apocalyptic. Even if I didn't always understand or agree with where Walker took things, I loved how widespread the implications of the slowing were.

What made this book such a high-rated read for me, though, along with the writing was Walker's glaringly honest description of middle school. Julia is a sixth grader much like I was, abandoned by a two-faced friend to face the awkwardness of sixth grade alone. She suffers from acute loneliness, desperate for connection but unknowingly sending out signals that send people away. She reminded me so much of past self and I just ached for her. Putting aside all of the post-apocalyptic stuff, The Age of Miracles captured what middle school felt like better than anything I've ever read.

Well done, too, is the family drama aspect. As the world falls apart, so does Julia's family. Her parents snipe constantly, her father escaping to work and her mother descending into a disease caused by the slowing. Julia herself alternates between trying to mediate and just wanting to wash her hands of it. The family's relationships, in good moments and bad, felt very legitimate to me, very real.

Though not a perfect book, I really, really liked The Age of Miracles. Walker's idea was new and fresh, her writing lyrical, and her characters well-drawn. I anticipate her next novel highly!

Favorite Quote: "When I think now of that moment in the kitchen, an almost unbelievable thought comes to my mind: There was a time when those two people—that man hunched at the table and that woman shouuting in a bathrobe—were young. The proof was in the pictures that hung on the living room walls, a pretty girl and a bookish guy, a studio apartment in a crumbling Hollywood building overlooking a courtyard and a kidney-shaped pool. This was the mythical period before I was born, when my mother was not a mother and was instead an actress who might make it someday, any day, maybe soon, a serious girl with a lovely face. How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible."

"Always thinking 'bout tomorrow
Before today is even through
Always thinking 'bout the future
What on earth will happen to you

There's so much more that I could be
So many places that I'll never see
So many lives that I'll never meet
I'll just dream until we get there in the end

And if the world stops spinning
Would I start moving home
And if the world stopped dreaming
Would I stop believing in it all"

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