Maciek's Reviews > The Age of Miracles

Karen Thompson Walker reportedly received a million dollar advance for The Age of Miracles, her debut novel - an unimaginable sum for a first work, which naturally helped spark a considerable interest in it. The six figure advance and the the anticipation reminded me of waiting for Justin Cronin's The Passage - a novel dealing with the fate of the world after an outbreak of a vampire virus. Ultimately, the reactions were mixed - you can read my review here.

While Cronin aimed at reviving the - if you'll forgive the pun - somehow dead vampire theme, Walker gives her work an original and interesting premise. After some inexplicable event, the earth's rotation starts slowing down - days and nights begin to extend, at first almost unnoticeable, but soon affecting the lives of people in a very palpable way. As scorching days and cold nights extend crops begin to fail and people begin to suffer from symptoms which can't be diagnosed to any known disease. This set-up should prove for a more than fertile ground for a fascinating work of speculative fiction - but The Age of Miracles isn't so.

The focus falls on the 11 year old narrator, Julia, who goes through all the troubles of growing up, first crushes and dealing with her parents' troubled marriage, as the earth slows down into a pace which will stretch the days and nights into years, making it uninhabitable. Julia's narration never feels like an 11 year old would think or speak, making the narration seem distant and detached. Since the novel is narrated in the first person, the book feels cold and clinical - there's not much emotion, spontaneity and energy which one would expect from a child narrator. The whole novel seems to want to resemble one of Ray Bradbury's old sci-fi stories (Julie even remembers reading one) but doesn't succeed at it. The science/speculative fiction aspect is reduced to be merely a background for Julia's story, and all the interesting possibilities and ideas are never developed to their full potential. As other reviewers noted, the novel is surprisingly tame - there is preciously little violence and mayhem which would undoubtedly occur among societies as a result of the Slowing, forcing the reader to stretch his suspension of belief even further than necessary. With its PG-13-feel it seems to have been tailored towards younger readers, despite being marketed as a work for adults.

The ending is sudden and unsatisfying, and I was never able to get rid of the feeling that I read just a part of a larger whole - the book as it is feels incomplete. I would rate it around 2,5 stars - certainly not worth a million dollars, as science fiction fans are bound to walk away disappointed and those preferring coming of age stories will find little if anything which they had not read before in this slim and vapid tale. Worth borrowing from a library if it strikes your interest, but just barely.