The Age of Miracles

Bibliography: Walker, K. T. (2013). The age of miracles: A novel. New York: Random Ho

ISBN: 978-0062059949

Genre: science fiction

Reading Level/Interest Age: 12+

Plot Summary: Julia is barely a teenager when time starts to slow. Every day, the sun slows, daylight is lengthened, night comes at odd times. No one has an explanation, but they see all the ways that the world is shifting: gravity changes, birds die, tides change, people panic. In effort to help her watch and understand the changing celestial patterns, Julia’s dad gives her a telescope. She uses it to watch much more than the sky, though; she watches the neighbors who are targeted because of their adherence to real time. She sees a family move away. She has a perfect view of her father cheating on her mother with the lady across the street. Not only is the world at large changing, but Julia is struggling to come to terms with the changes in her own world--her best friend is no longer interested in her, her mother is oddly ill, her grandfather disappears and her father wants to maintain normalcy. How can anything be normal when everything is changing? Can Julia figure out how to be her own person in a world where nothing is stable?

Critical Evaluation: The Age of Miracles is a book of parallelism. The major changes in the physical world Julia lives in mirrors the major changes an adolescent endures during puberty. Time has changed, seconds become minutes, minutes become hours. Without the precise and predictable movement of time, life becomes untrustworthy. The world becomes a stranger, just as the people in it become strange. An adolescent’s world changes just in the same way. Nothing is predictable; families and friends metamorphize into strangers; loneliness is inevitable. Author Karen Thompson provides a beautiful peak in a teenager’s paradoxical world. She uses vivid language to create unique imagery, showing the reader, instead of just telling them, about how “light would be unhooked from day, darkness unchained from night” (112). Thompson’s lyrical sentence structure underscores how profoundly words on a page can shift the perspective of the character into the reader’s own self. “This was the first lie I ever heard my father tell--or the first time I knew that he was lying” (42). Who among readers cannot remember the first time a lie had true and deep significance to them? From the very first page of the story, Thompson pulls the reader in with brilliant pacing, posing questions and dilemmas that demand the reader’s full attention. The ending of the story, however, was surprising. Because the book is written in past tense from the protagonist’s perspective, we know Julia survives the universe’s shift in time. But the story had no real ending. There was no explanation, no closure, merely a few pages of convenient summation of Julia’s life over the following decade. After such a powerful, expressive story, the ending of The Age of Miracles was an emotional letdown.

Reader’s Annotation: Everything in Julia’s life started changing on the day that the world noticed time was slowing down. How can she figure out who she is when nothing in her world, not even time, is stable?

Author Information:  Karen Thompson Walker was born and raised in San Diego, California, where The Age of Miracles is set. She studied English and creative writing at UCLA, where she wrote for the UCLA Daily Bruin. After college, she worked as a newspaper reporter in the San Diego area before moving to New York City to attend the Columbia University MFA program.

A former book editor at Simon & Schuster, she wrote The Age of Miracles in the mornings before work—sometimes while riding the subway.

She is the recipient of the 2011 Sirenland Fellowship as well as a Bomb Magazine fiction prize. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband.¹

Curriculum ties: science

Booktalks: What would you do if you suddenly had more time in your day?

Challenge issues/resources: n/a

Reasoning: The Age of Reasoning broadens the reader’s horizons, helping them to understand the infinite changes the world would endure if there was even a slight shift in time. It provides awareness of possible scientific consequences in an entertaining and thought-provoking manner.

References:

¹ Thompson, K. (n.d.). About the author. Retrieved December 2, 2015, from http://www.theageofmiraclesbook.com/author/