Review : The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

Posted by Kay on September 1, 2012 3:50 am in 3.5 stars reads | 6 comments

The Age of Miracles by Karent Thompson Walker
Pages : 288
Genre : Speculative Fiction
Stand Alone
My Rating : 3.5/5

What it’s about :

Slowly, the earth’s rotation has slowed down. Gravity changed, days and nights grew longer, the birds fell from the sky and people started fighting to find a new way of life.

Julia was only eleven years old when the slowing started, but the day is forever engraved in her memories; and as the world slowly changed, her life did too. Friendships were lost and found, marriages struggled, a new “gravity sickness” was discovered and the population divided itself between those who lived on “real-time” and those who didn’t. And meanwhile, the slowing continued…

My thoughts :

Don’t be fooled by the pretty, colorful cover; The Age of Miracles is not a feel-good, optimistic novel. In fact, it is quite gloomy and left me in a bit of a sad, depressed mood. I guess it’s not all that surprising: what do you have to hope for, when the world is ending?

The Age of Miracles was certainly a good read. Karen Thompson Walker’s prose is beautiful, rich and quiet, creating a suffocating yet realistic atmosphere for her characters. Very early on, I was reminded of Life as We Knew it, which I absolutely loved – even though it terrified me. While there is a slowness to the narration in The Age of Miracles that made the book less threatening for my emotional state, it still had that feeling of ineluctable end that kept me awake at night. The Age of Miracles was a good reminder of how small we are in this big universe, and how useless we would be if, for one reason or another, the planet suddenly decided to change her routine.

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. (p.29)

I can’t speak for the science behind the story; the author carefully avoids giving too complex explanations on what is happening or why. All we are left to witness are the consequences, and the human struggle to subsist in this strange, new world. If the quasi-absence of scientific theory will maybe disappoint the most science-minded readers, I personally appreciated it. It allowed the book to be told from a human perspective, to let aside the facts and see how it would feel, to grow up with such on weight on your shoulders.

This brings me to Julia, which I really liked as a narrator. I have often mentioned that even though I enjoy reading YA, I am very wary of child narrators (which is why I still haven’t read Room, though I did add it to my shelf this week!) Julia was different though; she felt quite normal, not too precocious or naive, just a regular kid going through something awful, too big to fully grab. Since the novel is told by Julia from some point in the future, her narration is never childish, but offers instead a mature contemplation of past events.

Sadly, the novel also had a few flaws that kept me from completely falling in love with it. There was a lot of foreshadowing from Julia, and it’s something I always have a hard time with. Once or twice can create a little suspense, but when it is constantly used as a device to create tension, its power diminishes and I only get annoyed. As for the slow narration, while it contributed to the creation of a wonderfully eerie world, sometimes it was just too slow to really keep my interest in the story. Finally, maybe in parts because of that last flaw, I had a hard time getting attached to the characters (other than Julia).

All in all, quite a good novel of speculative fiction. It gave me chills, certainly, and a lot to think about. While it doesn’t quite make it on my list of favorites, I know I’ll still be thinking about it for a while, and I wouldn’t hesitate recommending it to my fellow readers. The author’s voice will surely charm readers who are more reticent to stories of “end of times”, or those coming from the YA world and hoping for a more adult point of view.