Just Finished Reading The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

Karen Thompson Walker is an editor for a book publishing company who came out with her first novel, The Age of Miracles, in 2012.  The story centers around a nightmare dystopian scenario in which the Earth inexplicably begins to slow down in its orbit, causing all sorts of disasters and eventually threatening the human race...as well as life on our planet in general...with extinction.  In the middle of this calamity, Julia, an eleven-year-old middle-school student, is going through the pangs of early adolescence in her home California town while struggling with her social relationships.  Let's see if I can recognize them from my memories of this long-gone period in my own life: bullying ✓, snobbery ✓, family dysfunction ✓,  puppy-love crush ✓, indifferent teachers ✓, and feelings of isolation, inadequacy, and alienation ✓. Yep, they're all there, except that I wasn't having to deal with the end of life as we know it on Earth...although when I was her age back in 1968 I suspected that one day when I became of age, I would be drafted and sent over to Vietnam to die for my country in that endless war.  Oh yeah, don't forget that while (fictional) Julia and I were going through our typical teenage angst periods, the kids around us all openly pretended as if everything was totally hunky-dory in their own lives (and what's wrong with us)...✓

So The Age of Miracles, to me, came across as a story with a split personality.  On one hand there is the developing drama of a world slowing down and how humanity copes with the increasing problems of ecological disasters, earthquakes, solar radiation, and the destruction of the Earth's magnetic field...to name just a few.  On the other hand, there is the intense personal drama of Julia's life, family, and school.  And then there is the issue of time: as the planet's rotational day lengthens, a conflict grows between those who want to retain the strict 24-hour/day system regardless whether it is light or dark and those who want to adapt their day to keep in harmony with sunrise and sunset...those favoring the latter approach soon find themselves isolated and persecuted by the majority, which to me is the author's commentary on how irrationally cruel people can become when in groups and looking for scapegoats for their hardships...

From the beginning of this story I had my doubts about Karen Thompson Walker's adherence to established science...but hey, it's just a story and I'm not one of those "hard" science fiction readers who are obsessed with discovering "errors" in obviously fantastic tales.  Instead, I try to discern what the author was trying to say.  In this case, The Age of Miracles, the title of which is what early adolescence has been referred to in the past, is more about what kids have to go through during that difficult time in their lives than the sci-fi part.  The impending doom of the "slowing", to me, was just Walker's way of externalizing the internal struggles that Julia was having to deal with, anyway.  In the end, I liked this story and recommend it, but more because of the human angle to it, not the science fiction part.  The author accomplished something crucial to a story: she created a character I could identify with...