The Age of Miracles

A Novel

By: Karen Walker

Narrated by: Emily Janice Card

Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

Audie Award Nominee, Science Fiction, 2013

With a voice as distinctive and original as that of The Lovely Bones, and for the fans of the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood, Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles is a luminous, haunting, and unforgettable debut novel about coming of age set against the backdrop of an utterly altered world. "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."

On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, 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.

©2012 Karen Thompson Walker (P)2012 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

Advance praise for The Age of Miracles
: "[A] gripping debut....Thompson's Julia is the perfect narrator...While the apocalypse looms large-has in fact already arrived-the narrative remains fiercely grounded in the surreal and horrifying day-to-day and the personal decisions that persist even though no one knows what to do. A triumph of vision, language, and terrifying momentum, the story also feels eerily plausible, as if the problems we've been worrying about all along pale in comparison to what might actually bring our end."( Publishers Weekly)

"In Walker's stunning debut, a young California girl coming of age in a dystopian near future confronts the inevitability of change on the most personal level as life on earth withers. She goes through the trials and joys of first love. She begins to see cracks in her parent's marriage and must navigate the currents of loyalty and moral uncertainty. She faces sickness and death of loved ones. ...Julia's life is shaped by what happens in the larger world, but it is the only life she knows, and Walker captures each moment, intimate and universal, with magical precision. Riveting, heartbreaking, profoundly moving. ( Kirkus Reviews)

"What a remarkable and beautifully wrought novel. In its depiction of a world at once utterly like and unlike our own, The Age of Miracles is so convincingly unsettling that it just might make you stockpile emergency supplies of batteries and bottled water. It also - thank goodness - provides great solace with its wisdom, its compassion, and the elegance of its storytelling." (Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep)

I really wanted to love this book.......

I really wanted to love this book.......it had such an intriguing storyline....but in the end I found it just okay with never much excitement or punch to it.

I liked the fact that the book was written from an 11 year old girl's perspective....it's not often you get that kind of insight.....and there was a bit of foreshadowing that would cause you to want to hurry and find out what was going to happen.....but I always found that the answer was slightly dull and boring.

It was not a happy book....which is to be expected because of the subject matter......but I just felt it dragged along and the ending was probably the best part of the entire book. I guess I am just one of those in the minority who wasn't blown away by this book.....and that's okay by me. :)

Disappointed

When I read the description of this book, I was expecting a novel that would be similar to "The Day After Tomorrow" - a novel depicting the science and catastrophy of the slowing of the earth's rotation, with action-packed scenes of survival and dealing with the unexpected. Instead, I got a novel about a girl and her relationships, with the earth's slowing as the backdrop. Needless to say, I was disappointed.

In my opinion, the critics review of the book was grossly inaccurate and exagerrated.

The narrator was fine and did a nice job of telling the story that was written.

Achingly beautiful

While this book is meant for young adults, there is nothing juvenile in the author’s portrayal of the characters. Hauntingly realistic, I enjoyed every minute and would highly recommend it if you like stories featuring real humans with all their foibles and frailties set against a frighteningly realistic seeming backdrop of environmental catastrophe.

Meh

I read this a few years back and remembered loving it. I decided to listen to it on my way back and forth from my home in CT to work in NYC. If you’re tired, don’t listen to this because it will lull you back to sleep as it’s so long winded and boring. This could be a great book but it’s so wordy and a little blah....read it if you don’t have anything else to do.

Coming-of-age meets the apocalypse.

If you could sum up The Age of Miracles in three words, what would they be?

Coming-of-age meets the apocalypse.

Any additional comments?

A reader's race to the book's finish. The Age of Miracles is as bewildering and beguiling as growing up can be. Take a spin; you'll enjoy the ride! i found the ending very vague, and alot of unanswered questions about what to happen to the world and i almost assumed it was going to be a cliff hanger with a sequel, but she just sums it up in one chapter with a very vague description of whats to come in the next 10 years witch the way the speed of this book was going or the slowing i should say seem as thought it was imposable for humans to adapt to change. but some how a few do. im assuming she was taking darwin theory of adaptation

A suprising Gem

I downloaded this book not knowing what to expect. I had an extra credit and nothing on my wish list. I'm so glad I got it! This was an amazing story about the possibilities of us harming our world beyond repair. In the midst of it is a young lady that still had to deal with puberty, growing up and distancing parents. This was a very refreshing young adult novel.

A New Kind of Apocalypse

This is an inventive and original story about the unfolding calamities that follow a nearly imperceptible slowing of the earth’s rotation. Things go from odd to uncomfortable to cataclysmic over a period of a few years, as society unwinds in ways that wouldn’t occur to most people who weren't writing a novel about it. The plot is wrapped around the coming of age of a pre-teen California girl.

Narrators are a matter of personal taste, but this one, for me, was too much of a thin, little-girl voice for a memoir written from the perspective of an older character. It was too slow, too wistful, and too sad to be applied to every single situation.

Childlike Innocence Tinged With Adult Regret

There's been buzz about this book for quite a while now, and I have anxiously awaited it's arrival. While other books in similar situations recently have been a disappointment, this book deserves the recognition it's quickly garnered.

Our story is told by Julia, an 11 year old only child of a doctor and part-time teacher. She is enjoying a happy, typical childhood in Southern California, until the fateful Saturday that the news goes public; the rotation of the earth is slowing.

As both days and nights continue to grow in length over time, and the 24 hour clock looses all meaning in relation to the days and nights, the entire landscape of Julia's childhood and anticipated future begin to change. Some of these changes are easily anticipated, while others come as more of a surprise.

The book is told in past tense; allowing you to wonder as you progress through her story where Julia is now, and who we, her anticipated audience, are to be. The other benefit of the past tense is that while the story is being framed from the point of view of an 11 year old child, there is a subtle undercurrent of adult regret in the telling, as the older Julia tells us of that terrible first year of "the slowing". There is also something adult in Julia's growing discomfort of clocks; ticking away time she fears they no longer have, propelling them into a future she doesn't think she wants. The narration, performed by Emily Janice Card (yes, Orson Scott Card's daughter) also added greatly to the tone of the book, mixing child-like storytelling with tones of quiet nostalgia adults will recognize and respond to.

The author was very true to her point of view; at one point I found myself frustrated that we still hadn't really heard much about the economic fallout of the situation, until I realized; through the lens of an 11 year old girl, the focus will fall onto other matters. Once embraced, that fact seems to give the story it's authenticity.

At 9 hours in length, this book is not long; but as 11 year old Julia acknowledges, "Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words."

A well written, well read, sad and touching story.

Pass the Prozac, please!

Great writing, wonderful performance, but without question one of THE most depressing books I have ever encountered -- and truly, I generally LOVE the dark stuff! Ready to pull out an old copy of Lord of the Flies just to cheer myself up after that!

Unrelenting misery and gloom

Any additional comments?

I like a dystopian novel as much as the next person and this book had a good idea. Unfortunately, the author seemed to have gotten so caught up in the theme that there's no break from the misery. Everything awful that can possibly happen to the 11-year-old protagonist does. It reaches a point where you just want to curl up around her to protect her from the next blow. On top of that, whoever edited this should have paid attention to the continuity errors, excessive use of simile and reined in the foreshadowing (note: foreshadowing can be a useful tool when building tension. When it is used in every single scene in the first quarter of the book, it loses impact). The narrator was excellent, though - she effectively heightened the themes and moods as a good narrator should. The only problem was that this made the whole exercise much more depressing and sad than it already was. And that's saying something. If you want dystopia, read the The Hunger Games instead. Or better yet, The Handmaid's Tale.