I just finished reading it, which I chose to be part of my Goodreads.com Reading Challenge, that I talk about in this post, and I am left feeling gutted and empty now that it is over.
It is rare that I fall absolutely in love with a story like I did this one, and Karen Thompson Walker, if you are reading this, please write more!
**This Review May Contain Spoilers**
Everything is normal for Julia, a 12-year old living in California. She frequently has sleepovers with her best friend, Hannah, she goes to school and to soccer practice, she has a crush on a boy, she is an only child with two parents and two cats, she takes piano lessoons. Normal.
Until one day, for an unknown reason, the Earth starts to rotate slightly slower than usual. Minutes start tacking onto the days in increasing intervals, until the daylight hours are eventually as long as several calendar days. The same goes for the night, which last just as long.
Seemingly everything is affected by The Slowing, as the phenomenon is soon called; the tides, gravity, the sun and stars, health, crops, animals, people's attitudes and their decision making...
The Government employs a quick solution - that no matter what time the sun says it is, the citizens are to go by what the clock on the wall says. Everyone now needs to go back to living by "clock time", which regulates times to go to work and school, when to wake up in the morning and when to go to bed, when to eat dinner and when to take a shower...
Plants, being over-exposed to the deadly heat of days that last upwards of fourty hours, freeze when the sun sets and the blackness overtakes everything. Lawns wilt and turn to dirt, trees collapse, crops wither and die.
Food crops start needing to being maintained using artificial light in greenhouses that use up so much energy than country-wide blackouts become the norm.
The ozone starts to burn away. Time spent in the sunlight causes massive sunburns, skin cancer and radiation poisoning....
All of this happens while Julia is dealing with becoming a young woman. People start to move away. Some people decide not to follow clock time and instead decide to be awake during times of sun and asleep during times of darkness. Whole colonies of people who refuse to follow the clock spring up in the desert and all across the nation.
I listened to this book on audio, and while driving home during one dark night, I looked up in the sky to see a large, full moon. My stomach dropped and I felt uneasy. I had to remind myself that what was going on with the Earth, only existed in the story I was hearing. That is how powerful this book is. One of the smartest reads I have read in a very long time.
I applaud Ms. Walker for the amount of thinking and research that must have went into this novel, not to mention the concept itself. It is so scary because we may never know what to do if this were to really happen to us - and who's to say it never will?
Find out more about this book by visiting the books website: http://www.theageofmiraclesbook.com/
And as an added bonus, the website contains this video of the book's premise. Enjoy!
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