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Loading... The Age of Miracles (edition 2012)by Karen Thompson Walker
Work detailsThe Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
 ScarletBea | May 19, 2013 |  You can read my review here: http://abshepherdsreinventedreader.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/the-age-of-miracles-by-karen-thompson.html# (  ) ABShepherd | May 15, 2013 | It was a good drama about a girl growing up in a world that is no longer turning. It was believable and well-written. ( ) sweetchuckie | May 14, 2013 | The premise of this book was interesting and I read it quickly. However, the writing was abstract, flowery and distracting. The lack of concrete images was hard for me to get through. Also, the point of view was inconsistent throughout. The change between the narrator knowing the situation and knowing nothing makes it hard to follow and I never felt like I believed her. I viewed it all from afar. A lot of what I didn't like about this book, though, is based in the fact that this is a largely YA book and might appeal to someone who is familiar with the YA genre. (  ) lucyh | May 12, 2013 | What if our 24-hour day grew longer, first in minutes, then in hours, until day became night and night became day? What effect would this slowing have on the world? On the birds in the sky, the whales in the sea, the astronauts in space, and on a family and a young girl, who is already coping with the normal disasters of everyday life? One seemingly ordinary Saturday morning in a California suburb, Julia and her parents wake to discover that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. No one knows why, no one knows how to deal with it. The enormity of this change is almost beyond comprehension. Told through Julia’s eyes, this beautiful and original novel shows how easily life can fragment, within a family, within a community, and on a far wider plane when the rhythm of life as we know it is knocked so unexpectedly out of kilter. Luminous, haunting, unforgettable, The Age of Miracles is a stunning debut. Loving dystopian novels at the moment, they make me really appreciate the life I am living! This gradual, melancholy death of the earth is truly haunting but the main focus of the book a coming of age/rites of passage story filled with the loneliness and angst of the pre-teen that just happens to be taking place at the end of the world.So beautifully written I found myself constantly re reading passages and noting down quotes every few page. The science is a bit dodgy and contrived but stick with it if only for the beauty of such bitter-sweet prose.... “When we finally understood what was happening that morning, Hannah and I rushed outside to check the sky for evidence. But the sky was just the sky--an average, cloudless, blue. The sun shone unchanged. A familiar breeze was blowing from the direction of the sea, and the air smelled the way it always did back then, like cut grass and honeysuckle and chlorine. The eucalyptus trees were fluttering like sea anemones in the wind, and my mother's jug of sun tea looked nearly dark enough to drink.” “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?” ( ) jan.fleming | May 2, 2013 |
 What sets the story apart from more run-of-the-mill high-concept novels is Ms. Walker’s decision to recount the unfolding catastrophe from the perspective of Julia, who is on the verge of turning 12. Her voice turns what might have been just a clever mash-up of disaster epic with sensitive young-adult, coming-of-age story into a genuinely moving tale that mixes the real and surreal, the ordinary and the extraordinary with impressive fluency and flair. “The Age of Miracles” is not without its flaws. There are moments when the spell the author has so assiduously created wobbles, and moments when a made-for-Hollywood slickness seeps into the story. Some minor plot developments feel as if they had been created simply for pacing, and Ms. Walker sometimes seems so determined to use Julia’s circumscribed life as a microcosm of the larger world that the reader has to be reminded that “the slowing” is supposedly a planet-altering phenomenon.
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Wikipedia in English
And at times it felt so deeply american, so foreign: why was it only the 'nutters' that had solar energy? It's California, longer days, the issue of power should have been the least of their worries, for my european brain. (