The Age of Miracles in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Jan 09, 2013 Cristella rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks

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Feb 13, 2013 Kristi rated it liked it

Shelves: science-fiction, coming-of-age

This gets more like two and a half stars. I feel like Walker wanted to write two books. One is a slow-paced coming-of-age story, featuring a twelve-year-old girl and her struggles with friends and school as she watches her parents' relationship start to fall apart. The other is a science fiction exploration of a big "what if" - what if the rotation of our earth started slowing gradually and days and nights became longer and longer? Trying to combine these two stories just didn't work that well f This gets more like two and a half stars. I feel like Walker wanted to write two books. One is a slow-paced coming-of-age story, featuring a twelve-year-old girl and her struggles with friends and school as she watches her parents' relationship start to fall apart. The other is a science fiction exploration of a big "what if" - what if the rotation of our earth started slowing gradually and days and nights became longer and longer? Trying to combine these two stories just didn't work that well for me.

It's not that science fiction novels can't have both Big Ideas and good characterization and story, it's just that this one can't pull off either conceit. The Big Idea...isn't. There's no science here at all, really, and while I've often enjoyed good soft scifi, this book doesn't really even offer that - there's no explanation at all of how the earth's rotation could change so drastically, and ideas like the gravity sickness and far too rapid loss of the earth's magnetic field are just tossed in with the hows and whys barely addressed if at all. I suppose I could just call it magical realism and not let it worry me, but the story really doesn't work that way, either.

On the other hand, the characters and their world come off a little flat and distant, and sometimes Walker's characterization relies too much on stereotypes. The daughter of a flighty teenage mom is, of course, going to be the school slut, another girl is the Goth, and Julia's first best friend is classic Mean Girl. Her relationship with Seth at the end of the book grows too quickly for me, and I admit I was a little annoyed that ALL of Julia's female classmates seem awful.

This review is coming off a lot harsher than I initially intended. For all its faults, there are some lovely quiet moments in this book - Julia and her father exploring abandoned mansions that have been claimed by the extreme high tides, the exhausting and futile effort to save a family of beached whales, the stories of those who choose to go "off-clock" and embrace the longer days and nights. And there's a very quiet and suffocating sense of slow doom approaching that reminds me a lot of the young adult novel Life As We Knew It (which incidentally, has a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses as this book). When I walked outside into the sun after finishing this book I felt enormous relief that everything was okay after all and the sun was going to set and rise as usual. So obviously this book had more effect on me than I realized. I just wish the author had a better sense of what exactly she was trying to do. ...more

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Jul 17, 2012 Lori added it

Shelves: audio

I was disappointed with this one. It was such a creative premise but it just sort of copped out on the science part. I guess I'm too used to science fiction actually trying to be possible. I also thought the young girl perspective was somewhat forced and cheesy. Oh well. ...more

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