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)

Great book, kind of peters out at the end.

I finished the book in about a day. Great narration, intriguing story, kinda rough ending. It wasn't bad, and it didn't ruin it by any means, I just don't feel the ending really lives up to the premise. Another thing is that the characters aren't the deepest, but this is understandable to me, considering that they're supposed to be average people living day to day through an unprecedented situation, and the book succeeded with flying colors on that.

Brilliant

Brilliant, heartfelt, the end of a world seen through the eyes of an ordinary little girl. I cried at the end.

Quiet Dystopian

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

Riveting debut novel, young adult.

This is a debut novel which combines the sixth grade year of a young girl with what is in essence an altered world. One Saturday morning, Julia and her family in California awake to the same problem as the rest of the world-for some inexplicable reason, the earth started slowing down. Each day it gets slower with days and nights growing longer. This has an effect on people’s moods, on their physical condition, on their ability to play sports as gravity is affected, on the ability of birds and other animals to survive the environment, and, finally, on the danger of being exposed at all to the sun. Set against this incredible environment, Julia suffers the loss of friends, first love, not being popular, her parents’ marital problems, and her grandfather’s eccentricity. This is a riveting debut novel.

Story and Narrator Perfectly Matched

What made the experience of listening to The Age of Miracles the most enjoyable?

The narrator, Emily Janice Card, brings a pitch-perfect winsomeness to her performance of a young woman remembering and sensing her experiences on the edge of adolescence.

Mean Girls Confront the Apocalypse

Late in the novel, the father of Julia (the main character) asks his daughter "Do you know what a paradox is?" which kind of sums it up. This novel is a strange brew of contradictory aims and voices, ultimately leading to disappointment. As other reviewers have noted, the story is mostly about teenage (actually preteen) angst with mean behavior from the popular cliques at school, played out in lunchrooms, school buses, and pool parties. It is hard to fit in and figure out who you are, make sense of your parents troubled marriage, say the right things to the boy you have a mad crush on, and keep up with math homework, soccer practice, and piano lessons. Oh and the world is coming to gruesome, horrible end as the Earth stops revolving.

If you are looking for a poignant coming of age story this might be the book for you, although I wonder if the "end of the world" context really adds anything. If you are a hard core scifi/futuristic/dystopia fan, there isn't much here. Bad stuff is apparently happening out there, but without the details or imagination that would make it truly scary or plausible.

If there is a "message" here (not that there needs to be one) it may have to do with the human capacity to tune out larger catastrophes as we remain focused on the day to day crises of life.

The narration is excellent.

There Is Already a Better Version of This Book

Consider instead, Life As We Knew It, a YA novel from 2006 with a nearly identical premise and a much better-developed arc in terms of the tension and feeling of impending and realistic peril.

I am almost tempted to reread The Age of Miracles, even though I didn't like it, to see if it was the performance rather than the writing which imparted such a wistful, infuriatingly passive quality to the main character.

Walker relies a lot on descriptive generalizations rather than creating scenes, often referencing the future ("That would be the last time I ate a grape..") which took me out of the story. I also felt she didn't get the age of her character accurately. Julia's concerns did not seem like those of an eleven year old.

I can't recommend this book, at least in its audio book form.

Loved this book!

This is one of the best books I've read all year. I was enthralled in what really could be a realistic end of the world as we know it. Told from the viewpoint of an 11 year old, her viewpoint is fascinating and innocent. You are looking at the world through her eyes as the confusion unfolds all around you.

Love her voice

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

The narration was top notch and a unique story as a back drop.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Age of Miracles?

The description of what happens as the earths rotation slows had my imagination flowing.

Which character – as performed by Emily Janice Card – was your favorite?

The main character.

This is a young adult novel.

narration was good.

I downloaded it as a suggestion from audible, read a brief description and gave it a go.... The protagonist is an 11 year old girl, and the entire storyline revolves around her perspective in a dying world..

It wasn't for me.
but it deserves an ok rating