The Age of Miracles By Karen Thompson Walker

3.5 stars

I finished The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker in April. Since the day I put it down in thoughtful remorse, the thought of reviewing it has tortured me because of it's elegant simplicity, because of its prescience, because of its..."fullness," meaning it's potentail to divulge on so many interesting topics and concepts and themes and ideas like a million stars making up the night sky. Except, *sigh*, the plot didn't live up to it.

First of all, I feared that my review of this book would not fully portray how much Karen Thompson Walker did make me feel: heartache, loneliness, adolescent angst, love, lust, fundamental human NEED. And I was thrilled by the seamlessness with which Karen writes an apocalyptic fiction novel as a coming of age story written in such beautiful, poetic language. It's a remarkable feat.

However, the main reason I picked up Miracles was because I loved the science fiction basis of the story--the world is slowing a little bit more each day. Eventually, people must choose to live within their normal 24-hour bound or to accept the earth's natural circadian rhythms and rotations which means to forfeit civilized society (looking at you San francisco hippies). Like many apocalyptic novels Karen explores morality in the face of death: What would you do? How far would you go? Who would you choose? But because Miracles is laced with a coming of age story, the poignance of innocence (and loss of it) forces the reader to reevaluate their answers to these questions. The book did make me think. But at the end of the day, the concepts fell flat because let's face it: Karen Thompson Walker is no Isaac Asimov. Unfortunately, this unique mesh of apocalyptic fiction, bildungsroman, and literature seemed to become a limitation on the concept.

The Age of Miracles is an enjoyable, quick read and I do recommend it for a weekend if you don't take it too seriously. But ultimately, it's just like the Washington Post describes, a perfectly ordinary book. And its audience? "Thousands of people are duped into reading perfectly ordinary books just to see what all the fuss is about."