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quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
The clocks ticked as usual.
Yet the seconds bled into minutes.
Minutes grew into hours.
Hours into days of complete and total darkness followed by the scorching bright light.
Imagine having more hours in the day …
Think how time rules our lives. But what if our 24-hour day grew longer, first in minutes, then in hours, until day became night and night became 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 a family and a young girl, who is already coping with the normal catastrophes of her everyday life?
”People heard the news and they wanted to move. Families piled into minivans and crossed state lines. They scurried in every direction like small animals caught suddenly under a light.
But, of course, there was nowhere on earth to go.”
It’s approximately 20 years in the future. Julia is a 12-year-old girl living in a small Californian town who hangs out with her best friend, plays soccer and has a secret crush on Seth Moreno. Her mum teaches drama and her dad is an obstetrician at the local hospital. She’s got her whole life ahead of her to work out what she wants to do and who she wants to be.
But then the Earth’s rotation begins to slow. Days become longer – initially by minutes and then by whole hours. No one knows why it’s happening. No one knows how to reverse it. No one knows what the long term effects will be.
Julia, her family and her neighbours try to make sense of these events, even as they struggle to deal with its effects. But for Julia, the disaster takes second place to the smaller, more personal tribulations of her personal life, until global and individual catastrophe become intrinsically linked.
Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel is a literary take on apocalypse fiction that turns a global tragedy into a beautifully constructed, beautifully written set of individual disasters that kept me turning the pages until the very end and left me wanting more.
Julia narrates the events from several years afterwards, her hindsight giving every scene additional sadness and context. I believed in her reactions as a 12 year old and Walker has a good eye for the horrible things that kids do to each other. The deterioration of Julia’s friendship with Hanna and her awareness of her increasing social isolation is sensitively rendered. I also liked the depiction of her parents’ marriage, which reflects and contrasts with their attitudes to the disaster – her bewildered mum stockpiling food, her stoic dad trying to carry on as normal.
The disaster itself is a slow burn that gets progressively worse. Julia recounts it with an almost clinical detachment, the slow accrual of time and the effect on wildlife and the environment is more powerful for the sparse narration. Yet ordinary life carries on, people making incremental adjustments to the lengthening days and nights. The realism adds to the horror, especially the way Walker subverts scenes that would usually be used to give people hope, e.g. the astronauts return to Earth.
This was a brilliant, haunting and engrossing novel that kept me completely enthralled. I can’t wait to see what Walker writes next.
The Verdict:
Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel is a literary take on apocalypse fiction that turns a global tragedy into a beautifully constructed, beautifully written set of individual disasters that kept me turning the pages until the very end and left me wanting more. I believed in the characters and I believed in the apocalyptic scenario from beginning to end. I can’t wait to read Walker’s next book.
THE AGE OF MIRACLES is released in the UK on 21st June 2012. Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the ARC of this book.
Yet the seconds bled into minutes.
Minutes grew into hours.
Hours into days of complete and total darkness followed by the scorching bright light.
Imagine having more hours in the day …
Think how time rules our lives. But what if our 24-hour day grew longer, first in minutes, then in hours, until day became night and night became 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 a family and a young girl, who is already coping with the normal catastrophes of her everyday life?
But, of course, there was nowhere on earth to go.”
It’s approximately 20 years in the future. Julia is a 12-year-old girl living in a small Californian town who hangs out with her best friend, plays soccer and has a secret crush on Seth Moreno. Her mum teaches drama and her dad is an obstetrician at the local hospital. She’s got her whole life ahead of her to work out what she wants to do and who she wants to be.
But then the Earth’s rotation begins to slow. Days become longer – initially by minutes and then by whole hours. No one knows why it’s happening. No one knows how to reverse it. No one knows what the long term effects will be.
Julia, her family and her neighbours try to make sense of these events, even as they struggle to deal with its effects. But for Julia, the disaster takes second place to the smaller, more personal tribulations of her personal life, until global and individual catastrophe become intrinsically linked.
Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel is a literary take on apocalypse fiction that turns a global tragedy into a beautifully constructed, beautifully written set of individual disasters that kept me turning the pages until the very end and left me wanting more.
Julia narrates the events from several years afterwards, her hindsight giving every scene additional sadness and context. I believed in her reactions as a 12 year old and Walker has a good eye for the horrible things that kids do to each other. The deterioration of Julia’s friendship with Hanna and her awareness of her increasing social isolation is sensitively rendered. I also liked the depiction of her parents’ marriage, which reflects and contrasts with their attitudes to the disaster – her bewildered mum stockpiling food, her stoic dad trying to carry on as normal.
The disaster itself is a slow burn that gets progressively worse. Julia recounts it with an almost clinical detachment, the slow accrual of time and the effect on wildlife and the environment is more powerful for the sparse narration. Yet ordinary life carries on, people making incremental adjustments to the lengthening days and nights. The realism adds to the horror, especially the way Walker subverts scenes that would usually be used to give people hope, e.g. the astronauts return to Earth.
This was a brilliant, haunting and engrossing novel that kept me completely enthralled. I can’t wait to see what Walker writes next.
The Verdict:
Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel is a literary take on apocalypse fiction that turns a global tragedy into a beautifully constructed, beautifully written set of individual disasters that kept me turning the pages until the very end and left me wanting more. I believed in the characters and I believed in the apocalyptic scenario from beginning to end. I can’t wait to read Walker’s next book.
THE AGE OF MIRACLES is released in the UK on 21st June 2012. Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the ARC of this book.
