I loved this book. I read it in one 24 hour period. Great example of soft sci-fi/fabulist fiction. It's like a cross between Alice Sebold's book The Lovely Bones and Lars Van Trier's film Melancholia. In some ways, I also thought about Diary of Anne Frank. A young girl faces a possible apocalypse in MIRACLES. It's YA dystopia but more charming and whimsical than, say, The Hunger Games. Ultimately it is a book that celebrates life with one hand, as it erases life with the other.

The language of th More...

Starts off well but quickly fizzles into a pretty benign coming of age story. Also, while I'm not necessarily a stickler for hard science in my sci fi, it seemed like the author was too lazy to research the actual effects of the Earth slowing and just ignores the basic laws of the physical sciences. So much so that it really did take away from the story.
The whole apocalypse angle was incidental and unnecessary to the plot. A bland story all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Let me start by stating that Karen Thompson Walker received a $1 million dollar advance for this manuscript in the U.S., and another million in the U.K. That's the launch point for this review; whether or not it warrants those astronomical price tags.

[Some spoilers beware]

Before I'd even heard the hype of this book, I was just online researching for more "Semi-Unique End of the World" novels--because I'm probably a misanthrope.

After reading Everything Matters! and Galapagos, I just wanted somet More...

Most books I read a book serve as a form of escapism, a little welcome holiday from life.
But some books get inside your head, altering how you see your own life, even as you are reading them. Changing your perspective on the real world.
The Age of Miracles is one of those books. The Da Vinci COde had a little of the same effect - I never looked at his paintings in the same way again. But the Age of Miracles did it better. Without spoiling anything, I can say that the book begins with the mass-re More...

2.5
This is yet another rating I really struggled with because, though I can't say I really enjoyed it, the novel is beautifully written in a very evocative way that makes you want to write down a quote every few pages. But it comes back to that whole writing vs story matter that has stopped me from giving many prettily-worded books a high rating.

The dystopian aspect of The Age of Miracles creeps in slowly and in a mostly subtle and non-threatening manner. Basically, the normal 24 hour day begin More...

When John Donne wrote "Busy old fool, unruly sun, Why dost thou thus?" he wasn't thinking of the end of the world. But what if the earth began misbehaving so badly that it made the sun appear unruly indeed? What if the end of life as we know it came not with the Biblical Apocalypse or Armageddon, but instead with a slow unraveling of the diurnal cycle? And what if this happened when you were eleven-going-on-twelve, and just trying to navigate the 6th grade social scene?

Answer these questions an More...

This is the story of how we begin to remember. Well, no, not really. But that particular Paul Simon lyric has been swirling in my head this morning and I was just itching to use it. This is actually the story of the day the earth stood still, uhh, slowed down. And the days after that, and the days after that. Nobody knows why the earth's rotation has slowed, but Julia is eleven the day this discovery is announced on the news, with varying degrees of panic.


At first the effect is subtle, resulting More...

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I love when books can surprise you. I had a general idea of what to expect with Karen Thompson Walker's meandering, character and thought-driven novel about the end of the world, but I had no idea how bittersweetly she could spin this science fiction-adjacent tale of change, hope, young love, and death. I somehow assumed that this thoughtful exploration of the Earth's "slowing" would be a young-adult effort, but though protagonist and narrator Julia More...

The Age of Miracles is a beautifully written book. The prose is gorgeous and vivid with some great imagery, but it never goes over the top. The plotting is subtle, and the book is definitely more about the characters than what happens to the world they are living in. That is not to say there isn't a plot, but it is definitely not a plot-heavy story. It also has some very interesting and well-executed coming-of-age aspects. Make no mistake though. This is not a YA book. It does have a little cros More...

The Age of Miracles was both beautiful and extremely frustrating. Beautiful because the writing was exquisite; Karen Thompson Walker writes simply but succinctly. She's very expressive and knows her way around the written word. While I don't think it was as beautifully written as The Art of Fielding, her writing was sophisticated, evocative and nuanced; without trying too hard, her words successfully evoked the images and emotions needed to further her narrative, something which many other write More...

Se dovessi paragonare questo libro a qualcosa che adoro, lo paragonerei alla cioccolata calda: da bere nelle sere d'inverno, sotto una coperta, magari mentre fuori piove. No, non sono impazzita amici miei, è che "L'età dei miracoli" mi ha lasciato addosso una sensazione di calore indescrivibile, proprio come la cioccolata calda che ci scalda il cuore.
L'ho comprato ed iniziato il giorno dopo l'uscita ed, immergendomi nella lettura, mi sono sentita parte di essa, come se la nostra protagonista, Ju More...

Good enough that it made me rethink my opinion of Tom Perrotta's similarly themed book The Leftovers, also released this year. In this as well as Perrotta's novel, something like the apocalypse comes to the suburbs. In The Leftovers, the possible rapture vanishes a random assortment of people, many nonchristian. Those left behind continue with their adult suburban lives with the additional problem of militant religious groups (who were not taken away) and a strange doomsday suicide cult.

In the s More...

Look. I don't live in a vacuum. I know this is one of the most talked about books of the summer. Big displays in bookstores, frequent author appearances on my favorite public radio station cultural programming, reviews in my newspapers and journals of choice (that I didn't read - by the way - so I wouldn't spoil my experience). So hard I did try to consider this book on its own merits, without expectations. But I'm human. Given the hype, I'm gonna hope for a miracle.

Okay, maybe not a miracle. B More...

4.5 stars. A story full of wonder and impact. This is a remarkable book, and I found myself enveloped right from the start. The premise is imaginative, the developments perceptive, and the narrator heartbreakingly engaging. I can't help but wish the author had taken it a bit farther or deeper, but still I know this is one I will eagerly recommend.

Additional comment: I don't consider this to be inherently a YA book. Quite frankly, I am aggravated by the increasingly widespread belief that if a bo More...

I started listening to this book on Audible, and I can highly recommend the audio - the narrator was very good. However, I got so into the story that when my husband came home from the store with a copy of the book, I quickly put the audio down and dug in to the print. I needed to find out how the story ended. When I started the book, I expected it to be another work of dystopian fiction. I expected a cross between Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeiffer and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I quic More...

Growing from pre to teen is tough enough, but when the entire planet slows down, it makes the transition a whole lot tougher. Julia is a charming every-girl living an average life in southern California. Her coming of age joins with a slow-apocalypse vision in a merging of genres.

The ARE volume I read includes no explanation for why the earth’s rotation suddenly begins slowing. [Unless of course, I am an older, blinder coot that I realized, and just missed it] I have read that the cause was sup More...

I’m not sure I’d have read this book if not for the Goodreads First Reads program (I won a copy in late January) because I generally don’t gravitate toward middle grade, YA, or books with young protagonists. BUT this book, with its crossover appeal to adults, really was a wonderful surprise.

And any book that spurs a reader to action upon completion is definitely a book that has made its way into the subconscious. Case in point: an hour after closing the cover on The Age of Miracles, I felt compe More...

I was drawn to this book as a kind of "apocalyptic fiction" (when we come to the "end of the world" how will people adapt and carry on?) but it was more of a YA-type coming of age book.

The book is told from the point of view of 12 year old Julia who lives in San Diego when the earth's rotation slowly begins to slow down. Over the course of the novel a day on earth stretches from 24 hours to over one hundred which means there are 60 hours of day followed by 60 hours of darness or night. The magne More...

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Emily Janice Card. The narrator did a pretty good job, but I thought she read very slowly, and the book itself is about a slowing ... all this slowness sometimes left me a bit bored & weary.

This is both a book about changes happening DURING a major apocalyptic event & the life - sort of coming of age - of an 11 year-old girl. I like the IDEA of this book, but there were so many things that drove me batty. I got that this is a retrospective look bac More...

A beautifully told story of a Middle School age girl grappling with her family and social lives coming unglued as the planet itself does the same. This book gracefully pares down the micro and macro forces of our daily lives and shows with playful clarity the lack of control any of us really has beyond our own decisions.

Our hero is a young girl who is teetering between childhood and adolescence with all the uncertainty and upheaval it brings. Her body, her family and her friends are all much mo More...

I picked this up because of the best-seller hype, but I've read the first two chapters can't help thinking - "wait a minute, I've read this before, right? Coming of age in a semi-apocalyptic world...oh, yeah, that's right. This is the same thing that a dozen different YA authors have been churning out for the past 5 years." We'll give it a few more chapters and see how it goes...

Not a bad book, but I'm not sure I agree with all the hype. Written from the perspective of Julia as an adult looking More...

Another end of the world scenario unfurls in this slim little book, but it's imaginative: the slowing. No vampires or nukes, no pandemic or apocalypse, exactly - just a time went time fell out of tune with nature. Suddenly, the earth's rotation begins to slow, and 11 year old Julia is an innocent part of it all. She's writing from the vantage point of time, which is sort of encouraging, but we learn nothing, really, of the repercussions the slowing brings to society, aside from radiation poisoni More...

3.5 stars

I almost wanted to give her the forth star only for the last chapter..
nice novel, it made me feel so close to the characters in the novel...
the way she expressed her feelings was so smooth, she didn't make me feel that its a fiction novel when she described the whole situation of the SLAWING gradually...
I felt it so real , it may one day become real since we are continuing to destroy our planet....
she involved few true events in it which happened in reality like the death of the astron More...

Sometimes, the problem of being a book lover is that a gem can sit on your shelf for months after you've bought it as you get distracted by other titles, delve into a new book series before you can get to it. This was the case with 'The Age of Miracles'. For months, it sat on a pile of books that kept growing before I finally was able to sit down and read it. This is the story of eleven year old Julia who is in a time of her life that we all might remember and recognize, that awkward stage in on More...

I'm always wishing for more hours in the day.
More time to spend with family.
Time to finish all those stupid craft projects I've started over the years.
An extra hour or two to set aside just for reading.

But the slowing of the earth's rotation to gain more time...that's not exactly what I had in mind.


In 2010, I watched a show called Aftermath: When the Earth Stops Spinning on the National Geographic channel. (You can watch it on YouTube)
It scared the hell out of me!
As the simulated planet's rotat More...

3.5 - how do you do 1/2 a star?
The genre label on the library book spine was Sci-fi, but I don't think this book is really sci-fi. The story is rooted on our planet, in a time about now, when the rotation of the earth begins to lengthen. There is no explanation, but as the days grow longer (and the nights grow longer) everything changes for 12 year old Julia.

This is a coming of age novel but not one I'd recommend to a teen. It's written in a slow, measured style, and there is so much left unsaid More...

I picked up this novel primarily because of the buzz but also because it is set in San Diego where Walker grew up(and where I now live).

The Age of Miracles follows Julia, a young girl on the cusp of adolescence in a world on the cusp of collapse. Julia's San Diego looks a lot like mine except for the one small detail that her earth has suddenly started to turn more slowly: days swelling by minutes at first and then by hours, circadian rhythms interrupted by pervasive daylight and, alternately, More...