Review: The Age of Miracles

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this book in one setting during an ice and snow storm in Georgia and just loved it. It's a middle grades book told from a shy, late bloomer 11/12 year old's perspective, so I could relate to it a lot. It has an apocalyptic feel to it, as it's the future, and the earth's rotation around the sun has been altered. The result is overly long days, gravity issues, and a faulty magnetic field. The world, it seems, is literally ending. In the meantime, Julia is facing the normal challenges of a middle school girl: first crush/love, tension between her parents, girl drama, and lonely lunches in the library. To me, the book is an extended metaphor for early adolescents: you feel that your body and your sense of time is out of sync with the rest of the world. The book is a great mixture of melancholy, brutal realism, imagination, and hope. It's the very book I needed to read after a rocky 2016, a year that started with me losing a past spiritual mentor, continued with me passing my PhD program comps despite getting very sick and later my prospectus, included a tumultuous election year and political climate, yet ended with me spending time with family and a perfect New Year's Even wedding. 2016 was not always great. It was a year that, for me, included grief, illness of me and others who I love, disappointment, and persevering against the odds. Yet it was a year in which I wrote and reflected much, in which I literally read 40 plus books, in which I attended four lovely weddings, in which I spoke at two CONS and four conferences, and in which I found out that I will soon be an Aunt. So it was not, indeed, the end of the world. This book reminded me that in rocky times, the beautiful moments become even more important, and they are worth fighting for.

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