Book Review: Age of Miracles

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.

Those opening lines to The Age of Miracles introduce you to Julia, a sixth grader, who narrates for us and let's us see the new world through her eyes. What was once a twenty-four hour day is no more. The earth is slowing and the news people go crazy. Julia's mother is in a frenzy, her father isn't fazed. It's interesting to learn how various people, teachers, the school, neighbors,etc. react. Amidst the new trauma, Julia, at age eleven, is trying to survive pre-teen stuff, puberty, boys, and life.

The book blurb uses the words haunting and luminous. I agree. I loved this book and read it in one weekend, with a Wow as it ended. This portrait of a family against a backdrop of uncertainty, an altered world, is gripping. Folks decide if they are going to live by the twenty four hour clock, or go off time - just live with the sun rise and set and that changes daily. Sometimes there's darkness right in the middle of a day. It's unsettling and does make one think about the future, our planet, and life in general.

The Age of Miracles is well written and engaging with a light touch, humor, and drama. It's a quick engaging read - written with a deft touch. I'm jealous of the writer's skill.

Here's another excerpt (p. 29):  Later I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layers, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different - unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.