The Age of Miracles (2012) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters edit see section history

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• Julia: A lonely 11-year old girl living in California, who is quiet but within hides a certain strength.
• Helen: Julia's mother--a former actress and current high school drama teacher.
• Seth Moreno: Julia's classmate and secret crush. A skateboard is his favorite mode of transportation. He is having difficulty with his mother's cancer.
• Chloe: One of Julia's cats.
• Daryl: Bully who was at Julia's bus stop; new kid
• Trevor Watkins: Boy at Julia's bus stop.
• Harry: Michaela's mother's boyfriend
• Mrs. Pinsky: One of Julia's teachers; taught algebra
• Sylvia: Julia's piano teacher who lives just across the street.
• Tony: The other of Julia's cats.
• Tom: Husband of Carlotta; lives at the end of the street
• Kai: Michaela's boyfriend; he was half Hawaiian and one year older
• Joel: Julia's father, who is an obstetrician.
• Mr. Valencia: Neighbor of Julia's
• Michaela: Schoolmate of Julia who had a young mother and never went anywhere without her lip gloss.
• Gene: Julia's grandfather.
• Alison: Was Hanna' best friend before Julia.
• Hanna: Julia's best friend at the start of the book and Mormon who moves shortly after the discovery of the slowing.
• Adam Jacobson: Schoolmate of Julia's who was always asking questions
• Mrs. Marshall: Librarian
• Tracey Blair: A Mormon girl who became Hanna's best friend
• Mr. Jensen: Teacher; proponent of parallel universes
• Chip: A teenage neighbor of Julia's grandfather who helps with the grandfather's day to day chores.
• Miss Mosely: Science teacher at Julia's school
• Diane Kofsky: Student who spent her lunch hour in the library reading romance novels while steeling cheese puffs from her backpack
• Beth Kaplan: Neighbor of Julia; family were Orthodox Jews
• Josh: Michaela's mother's boyfriend's son
• Gabby: Julia's friend and neighbor, whose parents transfer her to a Catholic school
• Rolf: Julia's grandfather's uncle who had just up and disappeared one day.
• Keith: A boy Gabby meets on line.
• Carlotta: Wife of Tom; lived at the end of Julia's street.

Quotes edit see section history

• “There'd been a change, they said, a slowing, and that's what we called it from then on: the slowing.”

• “We were Californians and thus accustomed to the motions of the earth.”

• “I want you to think how smart humans are. Think of everything humans have ever invented. Rocket ships, computers, artificial hearts. We solve problems, you know? We always solve the big problems. We do.”

  Joel

• “We would guess and wonder and speculate. We would learn new words and new ways from the scientists and officials who paraded in and out of our living room through the television screen and the Internet. We would stalk the sun across our sky as we never had before.”

• “I wanted him to stay, too, but I'd grown expert at diplomacy as only an only child can.”

• “We were gaining more minutes with every hour. Already, they were arguing about the wheat point -- I've never understood if this was a term that had been buried for decades in the glossaries of textbooks, or if it was coined on that day, a new answer to a new question: How long can major crops survive without the light of the sun?”

• “In the time since that night, I've developed many of my mother's habits, the persistent churning of her mind on a single subject, her low tolerance for uncertainty, but like her wide hips and her high cheekbones, there were traits that would sleep dormant in me for some years to come.”

• “My own family's religion was a bloodless breed of Lutheranism -- we guarded no secrets, and we harbored no clear vision of the end of the world.”

• “Later, I would think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different--unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”

  Julia

• “And it seems to me now that the slowing triggered certain other changes too, less visible at first but deeper. It disrupted certain subtler trajectories: the tracks of friendships, for example, the paths toward and away from love. But who am I to say that the course of my childhood was not already set long before the slowing? Perhaps my adolescence was only an average adolescence, the stinging a quite unremarkable stinging. There is such a thing as coincidence: the alignment of two or more seemingly related events with no causal connection. Maybe everything that happened to me and to my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. it's possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”

• “Lately, I'd begun running out of things to say to other kids. I'd stopped knowing how to respond.”

  Julia

• “Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.”

  Julia

• “IN the cosmetics aisle, fifty feet of shelving displayed in glittering packages all the powders and the polishes and the creams, the shimmer sticks and eyebrow pens, the tweezers and clippers and razors that, I had begun to suspect, if applied in the correct combinations, might begin to transform me into a girl more lovely and more loved.”

  Julia

• “How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible (89)”

• “From then on, we all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how long a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret? But the new law of gravity was not enough to overcome the pull of certain other forces, more powerful, less known--no law of physics can account for desire.”

  Julia

• “This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove.”

  Julia

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• California
• San Diego
• Circadia: A community which was created after the slowing whose residents are all real timers.

First Sentence edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• slowing: the term used to reflect that the earth's rotation had lengthened by fifty-six minutes resulting in longer days and nights.
• wheat point: the amount of time crops can survive without the light of the sun
• real timer: individuals who choose to live their lives on true day and night cycles
• clock timer: those who choose to live their lives on a government-established, traditional 24 hour cycle.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Karen Thompson Walker (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PS3623.A4366A73
• Dewey: 813.6

Notes for Parents edit see section history

A couple places with adult language, not elementary level.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Women's Fiction

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Could the Earth’s Rotation Really Slow Down Like It Does in the New Novel The Age of Miracles?: An article in Slate Magazine referencing the slowing premise introduced in The Age of Miracles.

More Books Like This edit see section history