Released: June 26th, 2012
Pined over for months, finally bought it!
Description from Goodreads:
“It still amazes me how little we really knew. . . . Maybe everything that happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”
Luminous, haunting, unforgettable, The Age of Miracles is a stunning fiction debut by a superb new writer, a story about coming of age during extraordinary times, about people going on with their lives in an era of profound uncertainty.
On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, 11-year-old Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life—the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.
With spare, graceful prose and the emotional wisdom of a born storyteller, Karen Thompson Walker has created a singular narrator in Julia, a resilient and insightful young girl, and a moving portrait of family life set against the backdrop of an utterly altered world.
At the beginning of the summer, I saw a blurb for this book in a magazine. I saved that magazine page in the back of my copy of Pure, and after months of thinking about it and wondering if I should spend the money to buy it, I went for it. I also shocked myself in reading this in 3 sittings over the past 3 days. This book helped me break out of my reading slump and I am forever grateful. Not only because this book helped me get back on the wagon, but because this story was fantastically written. I am heartbroken over this story at the same time as I am afraid.
Onto the review!
