The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker is the coming of age story of a girl named Julia, who is living in a California suburb when the news comes that the rotation of the Earth is slowing. No one knows why, but the days and nights are getting longer very quickly. 

When I first heard the premise of this book, I thought this was going to be a Big Story, like The Martian, where there's a person who is the focus on the book, but we also see people at NASA and the UN working on a problem. That is NOT this book. This is a book about a girl growing up while the world is changing in crazy ways around her. We only hear from experts in occasional newspaper clippings and on television news. This is about a girl and her singular experience.

The earth's rotation is truly slowing by 47-thousandths seconds of a day, so scientists have been adding leap seconds here and there, so this isn't as silly a premise at it may seem, although the idea that the rotation would slow by hours in a single day is pretty farfetched. I think some of the science in this book is a bit precarious but to quote Glen Wheldon, I'm here for science fiction, not science fact. For instance, I think the electrical grid would fail long before it did in this book, but I didn't write the book, so who cares what I think?

Look, this book is pretty dire. If you're not in a place to read a dystopian sci-fi novel with focus on a decimated planet, don't read it. But I honestly thought it was a lovely bit of writing and the pages were easy to turn and it was exactly my kind of thing. 

4/5 stars

Lines of note:

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. (page 29)

I have found this to be absolutely true. I'm worrying about X, but Y is the thing that comes out of left field and becomes the focus. 

My grandfather was eighty-six years old. All his old friends were dead. His wife was dead. he had grown bitter about his own longevity. (page 60)

My maternal grandmother, who lived to be almost 100, once told me that there was nothing worth living for once she turned eighty. I mean, I felt a little hurt by this statement, but I also understood what she meant. 

Ours was a sudden bond, the kind possible only for the young or the imperiled. (page 223)

I know that some of you have developed wonderful friendships in adulthood, but I honestly believe that I'll never have a friendship as great and genuine as those that I developed when I was young and had all the time in the world to devote to building friendships. 

We were beach kids, sunshine kids. We did not know the properties of snow. I had never seen it fall, never knew how soft it felt at first, how easily it collapsed beneath feet, or the particular sound of that crunch. I never knew until then that snow made everything quiet, somehow silencing all the world's noise. (page 230)

Snow does make the world so muffled. I loved everything about this description. 

Hat mentions:

Sylvia would spend the next few afternoons pruning roses in a sun hat and casually pulling up weeds. (page 23, this same sun hat comes up on page 130 and 160)

She rested for a moment, hands on hips, looking around from beneath the wide brim of a straw hat... (page 115)

Inside were albums of black-and-white photographs of my grandparents in stylish hats and fur-lined coats...(page 141)

It was a man in a beach hat, an empty white bucket swinging from one hand. (page 194)

A man in a faded blue T-shirt and a wide-brimmed hat...(page 210, same hat referenced on 211)