The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker is a beautiful book. My favorite of the summer so far.

In the beginning of the novel, eleven-year-old Julia's world changes when scientists announce that they have observed a slowing of the earth's rotation. The cause is unknown, the effects, for the most part, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Slowly, the days lengthen, gravity shifts, the power flickers, seagulls and whales, then grass and eucalyptus become extinct. All the while, Julia and the adults around her struggle to understand what is happening to them and look for ways to keep the world as they know it, one precious moment of daylight at a time.

Walker's end-of-the-world is no fiery apocalypse. It is one where the taste of grapes and strawberries, then even the smell of grass and the sounds of birds, are forgotten, but human life on earth goes on, in its persistence, insensible to the loss of these great beauties.

And before the backdrop of these cosmic miracles Julia's own life unfolds: she takes piano, plays soccer. She is good at math, she loses her best friend Hanna, she eats lunch alone in the library, her birthday is forgotten, she forms a bond with Seth Moreno. Her parents fight. She and Seth visit the ocean to help to save the whales beached there, casualties of the shifting tides and magnetic fields of earth:

We rushed to fill our cups with water and then ran back across the thick band of mud. We looked for the driest whale, the one most in need. We found it at the edge of the group, and we imagined that it was older than the others. Its skin was striped white with scars. I shooed flies from its eyes, one eye at a time. Seth poured our meager water supply over its head and into its mouth. He petted its side. I felt an urgency like love.

"Hey, kids," someone called from behind us. It was a man in a beach hat, an empty white bucket swinging from one hand. A gust of wind drowned out what he said, so he shouted it again: "That one's already dead."

The futile beauty of this scene almost made me cry, and as Julia's world's tragedy unfolds, this futile beauty only grows.

And her days grow to 40, then 64, then 78 hours; tortuously hot periods of dangerous radiation followed by frigid deserts of dark.

This is not an adventure story. Nor is it, exactly, a coming of age story. Julia, though relatable, is somehow transparent as a narrator. The plot is simple, but effectively so. Julia's voice invites readers to overlay their own adolescences onto the backdrop of the slow and inexorable end of life as we know it.

And at the same time, Walker asks, perhaps begs, her readers to see their own lives reflected in Julia's, not out of some environmentalist crusade (noble though those may be), but out of something much more simple:

Nothing is certain.

Not the tide not the birds not the sun.

But our world is very beautiful.

Julia's story is an unhurried narrative that becomes, in so many ways, an elegy for the world that we are so lucky to still have hold of. At least for now. Nothing I've read in a long time has made me feel so acutely the beauty and promise of this Earth we still have, and its incredible fragility.

One day, Julia's street is destroyed as repair crews work feverishly to keep up with the damage the radiation storms are wreaking on the power grid. She and Seth leave their names in wet cement. Shortly thereafter, she looses him.

Looking back, Julia remembers:

We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew -- our names, the date, and these words.

We were here.

Reading this novel on a summer afternoon, I emerged from its pages and the coffee shop where I had been reading alongside a friend. The heat index in Baltimore had reached 113 that day, a storm was brewing, and we looked up together at remarkable clouds that she remembered from her childhood as a presage of tornadoes. As we walked down the street and hot wind whipped up the day's dust in front of us, I wasn't quite sure if I was in the real world or back in Walker's luminous pages.

This, Dear Reader, is a book worth reading.