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The Age of Miracles [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Karen Thompson Walker
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
List Price: CDN$ 29.95
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Book Description

Jun 26 2012

Amazon.ca Editors' Pick: Best Books of 2012

From a stunning new literary voice comes a brilliant debut novel that created an international auction frenzy, with sales in twenty-seven countries to date, about a young girl growing up in extraordinary times.
 
On a seemingly ordinary Saturday morning, Julia and her family wake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. Set against this threat to normal life, The Age of Miracles maps the effects of catastrophes big and small on the lives of ordinary people, and in particular, one young girl. Extraordinary for its original concept, unforgettable characters, and the grace, elegance and beauty of Karen Thompson Walker's prose, The Age of Miracles is a mesmerizing story of family turmoil, young love, and coming-of-age set against an upending of life as we know it.

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Review

FINALIST - Goodreads Choice Awards 2012
Amazon.com - Best 100 Books of 2012
Amazon.ca - Best 100 Books of 2012


“The novel's wondrous momentum rolls on with the insistence of the restless surf that swallows the beachfront homes; you can't stop reading if you try. Walker refuses easy solutions, instead offering up the revolutionary and bittersweet idea that stolen moments can give any life meaning: a few hours learning to ride a skateboard; running on the beach with a boy you're half in love with; the cool, sweet taste of the last grape you ever eat. Miracles do happen, she seems to say. You just have to know where to look.”
Kansas City Star

“In Walker’s stunning debut, a young California girl coming of age in a dystopian future confronts the inevitability of change on the most personal level as life on earth withers. . . . Walker captures each moment, intimate and universal, with magical precision. Riveting, heartbreaking, profoundly moving.”
Kirkus (starred review)

“You open the cover of Miracles and read the first page, and then the second, and when next you look up, the day has fallen away and everyone else has gone off to bed and your legs have stiffened beneath the table.”
Edmonton Journal
 
“Her voice turns what might have been just a clever mash-up of disaster epic with sensitive young-adult, coming-of-age story into a genuinely moving tale that mixes the real and surreal, the ordinary and the extraordinary with impressive fluency and flair.”
The New York Times
 
“Touching and harrowing, but above all magical, The Age of Miracles is an impressive debut. And there can be no better time to experience it than during the long (but reassuringly shortening) days of summer.”
The Globe and Mail
 
The Age of Miracles is a gentle reminder of what adolescents learn and adults try to forget—that the world is alarmingly mysterious and that the talismans of modernity are no defence against the ‘unimagined, unprepared for miracles or calamities of love and loss.’”
The Daily Telegraph
 
The Age of Miracles is dazzling and powerful. It’s a fundamentally human, utterly realistic novel not of a disaster, but of lives lived in the face of disaster.”
National Post
 
“. . . one of the major themes of The Age of Miracles is as surreal—and intriguing—as a Salvador Dali painting.”
Winnipeg Free Press

About the Author

KAREN THOMPSON WALKER holds an M.F.A. from Columbia University and is an editor of fiction and non-fiction at Simon & Schuster. The Age of Miracles is her first book.

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Customer Reviews

Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Publishers had a bidding war for THIS? Jun 27 2012
Format:Hardcover
I am truly stunned this book is not being marketed as Young Adult fiction. Having a blurb that compares it to The Lovely Bones is downright laughable. This is like Judy Blume meets Ray Bradbury (though his less popular short stories, the ones that leave you feeling incomplete). The premise is fantastic and the author does a decent job of portraying the effects of a world slowing its rotation, but the storyline itself moves just as slow as the Earth. Clichéd characters acting in predictable fashion leave you only with the sci-fi premise to keep you guessing.

Equally stunning is the author's poor use of analogy. "I missed Hanna like a phantom limb." You get what the author is going for, but it's sloppy'she either misses Hanna like a limb, or the loss of Hanna is reminiscent of phantom limb syndrome. This is but one example. Also, the use of "light-years" as a measurement of time, rather than distance, is rather unforgivable in a science-fiction novel. True, it's a piece of dialogue spoken by the 11-year-old girl, Julia, but unless the point of the statement was to intentionally aggravate the reader, the line could have been changed. I suppose it all comes down to poor editing in the end. The line "Just hope you didn't inherent my genes, Julia" is frustrating as much for the use of "inherent" over "inherit" as it is for the contrived sentence itself; pretty sure she's inherited your genes, buddy. Oh, and don't call the character Gene if he's going to have a line about genes. The world is your oyster and all the names in it. Pick something else.

Overall, this is more than readable. You'll probably plow through it in an afternoon. I can't help but feel it could have been done so much better.
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5.0 out of 5 stars THE AGE OF MIRACLES Mar 9 2013
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This hauntingly told story by a 11./12 year old girl keeps you on the edge of your seat to the end as did Cormac Mc Carthy's novel..THE ROAD.The progression of the earth's remaining days filled me with great sadness .Karen Walker wrote a compelling novel of what could possibly occur in the future to this planet and made me appreciate what we have now on this planet which is also in some trouble for survival.
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4.0 out of 5 stars More Bookish Thoughts... Aug 30 2012
By Reader Writer Runner TOP 50 REVIEWER
Format:Hardcover
"This is the way the world ends," T.S. Eliot famously wrote, "not with a bang, but a whimper." Indeed, The Slowing that occurs in "The Age of Miracles" begins imperceptibly. Something inexplicable has happened to the rotation of the Earth, adding minutes to the length of each day and causing disruptions to gravity, animal life and plant growth. Experts offer no solutions and, as the disaster escalates, some people turn to their faiths; others embrace the new time, syncing their circadian clocks to the increasingly distorted natural time rather than imposed clock time.

Karen Thompson Walker has written a refreshingly human debut novel, which becomes less about a disaster and more about community, family and growing up. The narrator, eleven-year-old Julia, comes of age in the story and discovers distortion in the world around her: secrets embedded in her parents' marriage and faults in her own relationship with her best friend.

Walker has created a rich novel, a brilliant, heartbreaking account of growing up. Julia comes across as a well-developed, fully rounded character and the entire community emerges as well-rendered and complex. The book's one weakness comes in the final chapter, in which Walker wraps up too quickly, encapsulating the lives of the main characters with a perfunctory quality.
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