Book Review: The Age of Miracles

Author: Karen Thompson Walker
Release date: June 21st 2012
Dates read: June 26th – 28th 2016
Book format: Hardback
Star rating 4 out of 5 stars

Synopsis on Goodreads

‘It is never what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophies are always different – unimagined, unprepared for, unknown…’ What if our 24-hour day grew longer, first in minutes, then in hours, until day becomes night and night becomes 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 an eleven-year-old girl, grappling with emotional changes in her own life..? One morning, Julia and her parents wake up in their suburban home in California to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth is noticeably slowing. The enormity of this is almost beyond comprehension. And yet, even if the world is, in fact, coming to an end, as some assert, day-to-day life must go on. Julia, facing the loneliness and despair of an awkward adolescence, witnesses the impact of this phenomenon on the world, on the community, on her family and on herself.

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I didn’t know what to think of this book when i first saw it on TheBookPeople site.The cover looks really beautiful and the cheap price was a bonus so i thought why not?
I really loved this book, i would have given it a 5 star rating but 1 star had to be deducted purely for the fact of the 11 year olds acting like they were way older than they were.

I loved the idea of something happening to Earth without it being linked to the supernatural, well not in writing anyway, and being written well. There was a build up with that was happening, which is something that i love within these kinds of books. I hate books where the reader has everything happen within the first half of the book, and the last half being the characters trying to figure how to deal. You can easily relate to how the characters within are taking in the situation. Would you carry on with the 24 hour clock when the days are much longer, or would you become one of those that deal with ‘Real-time’, sleeping during the night and being awake when it’s day?

I don’t know how i would cope in the situation where the Earth turns more slowly and it just gets worse from there, BUT i do know that i will recommend this book to literally anyone because i love it so much!