Karen Walker Thompson's Age of Miracles

Middle-school, puberty are not fondly remembered by many. Imagine going through it while the world, i.e. the earth, seems to be slowly coming to the end. This is the premise of Karen Walker Thompson's  novel, The Age of Miracles. It is both wacky and profound and all's told with a grace and a deceptive simplicity.

At the start of the book, without anyone's noticing at first, the world starts spinning a bit slower day by day, adding minutes to each day and night. Eventually, unspecified "authorities" notice and on a normal seeming Saturday an announcement is made. As you might suspect, this causes certain changes leading many to panic. Birds start dying off en masse, tides advance a bit further inland, gravity increases forcing everyone, from ball-players to pilots to adjust, serotonin levels increase releasing inhibitions prompting impulsive behaviors......And, ultimately, as the days and night grow longer, the ability to grow food on earth grows imperiled. All this "Big Stuff" is happening and Thompson tells about it from the eyes of a middle-school age girl, Julia.

For Julia, all the big-picture, apocalyptic changes are on her radar. But, so are all of what we normally think of as the "small-picture" events: her best friend growing apart from her, other friends growing boy-crazy, her body slow development, her crush on Seth, and, most worrisome to her, the growing cracks in her parent's marriage. These small picture changes and dramas keep happening, and the characters in the book are really good at ignoring the catastrophe unfolding and getting wrapped up in the everyday and the dramas of their lives. Maybe this is a function of the slow speed of the catastrophe. Undoubtedly it is also a form of denial.

In part, the necessities of life demand a certain level of denial. Soon after noting the slowing, citizens in California are asked to order their lives by clock time for the smooth functioning of society. When Julia and her classmates return to thier floodlit school one Monday morning in the middle of a long night, They are "told to disregard the bells, now rogue, the whole ell system having come unhooked from time"(43).

 Julia and those around her become increasingly conscious of how dependent they were on the earth's ancient and unnoticed movements. The earth's regularity, its seemingly eternal consistency has instilled  a certain child-like faith that the world is tailored to their needs and wants. Like a child become aware of their parent as a separate being, they experience a profound loss. Thompson's Julia observes "It's hard to believe that there was a time in this country-not so long ago-when thick almanacs were printed every year and listed, among other facts, the precise clock time of every single sunrise and every single sunset a year in advance. I think we lost someting else when we lost that crisp rhythm, some general shared belief that we could count on certain things"(96).