Book #23: The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

This is our book club book for the month of May. It was kind of funny because someone in our group was saying how she just didn't want to read another YA dystopian apocolyptic novel, and that's exactly what we somehow ended up picking. I kind of felt the same way, but I still picked this up from the library and ended up reading it all last night in one evening while Tommy was working.

The basic premise of the book is that the world stops revolving at the same reliable rate--it starts slowing down, which everyone on earth then refers to as "the slowing." This means that the days end up getting longer and longer and longer--each day having several minutes added to it at a time. The narrator is an eleven-year-old girl named Julia, and the whole novel is basically her coming-of-age story in the middle of this catastrophe.

I didn't love this book. I liked the idea of the "slowing," and I thought it was an interesting twist on the whole world-ending thing that is so popular right now in fiction--but the author never goes on to explain WHY the slowing happens. She just has all her characters say over and over again that nobody knows why it happened. It seemed like she was too lazy to do any physics research to back up her whole plot. The book is basically how everyone reacted to the change (like, even though the days are longer than 24 hours now, everyone decides to stick to the 24-hour clock, etc.) and what things happen on earth as a result of the change (all the whales get beached and the birds start to die, also for semi-mysterious reasons that are kind of hinted at but mostly people still "didn't know").

I also didn't really feel like Julia was old enough for me to take her seriously as a narrator. I mean, eleven? I have a recently-turned-twelve-year-old brother who is incredibly smart but of course does NOT write/talk like Julia does. She also doesn't have any friends because her best friend has left her and she's lonely at school--but having been that age and being lonely, I don't think Julia seems that affected by having no friends. There's also a love story between her and another kid and again, really? He leaves at the end of the book and she says (as an adult looking back) that she still dreams about Seth coming back to her--this kid she had a crush on when she was eleven! I mean, come on. That really bothered me. I also couldn't tell whether the narrator was supposed to be eleven-year-old Julia or adult Julia looking back on that time period, because it definitely seemed to be both.

However, I did like the style of Walker's writing--there were some beautiful and poetic lines that I liked. It was definitely a decent book, but not my favorite.