I’m not sure how The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker ended up on my To Read list at Goodreads. Maybe I saw that many of my friends had read it, or I had seen it was in development for a movie, or Goodreads recommended it based on my previously read books. Based on the title, I was expecting something different.
The underlying story is about the earth slowing down in its rotation on a daily basis so days and nights are longer. Birds are affected first with them having difficulty flying and navigating. Light and dark quickly fall out synch with clock time and there is a societal schism between real- and clock-timers.
The real story is about an 11 year old girl navigating junior high; a coming of age story in this unusual global catastrophe. She navigates friendships, a first crush, her mother’s illness, her father’s infidelity, her grandfather’s death, all while sunlight stretches to 40 hours, the magnetic field is so broken that the aurora can be seen regularly in San Diego, radiation prevents further exposure to sunlight, and wheat can’t be grown anymore.
I found I was more interested in knowing the science in what would really happen if this slowing occurred. The story only gave glimpses of what happened in California but I was curious what was happening in other parts of the world. I wanted a Discover Channel show about it or something.
The Young Adult fiction part of the story wasn’t all that compelling though the idea of the slowing captured my imagination.
