This book!! My sister Joy loaned it to me and I really treasure this story.
A gem. A debut novel that is sure to knock your socks off and make you think. Really make you think and hopefully take action to better our environment/the natural world around us and make better choices about what we consume/purchase.
STORY SUMMARY
Julia is 11 years old and in 6th grade. She lives with her father, a doctor, and her mother, a teacher, in a middle class suburban neighborhood in coastal California.
On what appears to be a normal Saturday morning, Julia and her parents wake up to discover that changes are going on in the world around them. The rotation of the earth has started to slow down! The days and nights are getting longer and longer. Gravity is affected and the natural environment is thrown into confusion and disarray.
But Julia is also struggling with the normal middle school angst of most 6th graders. She sees some rocky times in her parents' marriage; she is losing friends; she's experiencing the angst of first love and she sees the bizarre behavior of her beloved grandfather who is convinced this new phenomenon rocking the earth is actually a government conspiracy. He spends his day cataloging his possessions and stockpiling goods. Julia's mother begins to do the same.
The world is now calling this strange new experience, the Slowing. Birds, plants and people are dying. Her own mother has "the Syndrome"..her body isn't able to sleep well as the sunlight now lasts more than 48 hours at a time. This causes fainting, confusion, and a lack of motivation. The world is divided now into two groups of people: the real-timers and the clock followers. The real timers are realists. They accept the new rhythms of the earth and in fact begin to start their own communities, one of which is called Circadia where Julia's teenaged neighbor boy Chip flees to. The majority of the people fall into this category. The other people, including Julia's family, continue to follow the traditional 24 hour clock rhythms. They act as if nothing has changed.
But everything....everywhere...is changing.
As Julia transforms from little girl to pre-teen, she discovers that life is not always packed into neat little boxes. She matures even during hard times...unpredictable times...and she perseveres in the midst of all the hardships in her life.
MY THOUGHTS
This story is told in Julia's voice and I found that intriguing. The perspective of an almost teenager is very interesting.
Life changed drastically for the people and I couldn't help but be amazed that the author who wrote a debut novel way back in 2012 and had it set for about 2021/2022 (there are clues in the story that allude to this) had so many parallels to our current Covid times. It's uncanny!!
This is a good picture of how when we face extraordinary times, we tend to continue to cling to the ordinary things..to the habits we are used to even if it means we will self-destruct or even if those methods do not work any longer.
This book is also a "coming of age" type of story as well. We see and practically feel Julia's loneliness in the absence of true friends until Seth comes along. With Seth she learns about love and friendship and heartache.
She learns that not all parents are predictable and trust worthy and yet she continues to love her mother and father and can forgive her father of his affair with the piano teacher.
We see a glimpse into the bullying and cruelty of middle school girls and boys.....and we cheer Julia on to be better than the classmates around her.
There were a couple of quotes that really jumped out at me:
"I liked thinking that time really did pass less quickly there (in Circadia) than it did where we lived. And if so, if every event took a little longer to transpire, then were the consequences of those events also less swift?" (pg 161 The Age of Miracles, by Karen Thompson Walker, c. 2012)
"I should have known by then that it's never the disasters you see coming that finally come to pass; it's the ones you don't expect at all." (pg 248)
This book is powerful too for those of us who care about God's creation. Our environment is a mess and it's mainly due to us humans! It's sobering to think that some of these things depicted in the slowing of the Earth's rotation could really come to pass, scientifically speaking.
In my opinion, this book is appropriate for ages 14 and older.
I'm hoping the author has written more novels. I'm going to check!
2 comments:
Sounds like an interesting book. It is so cool that you and your sister read many of the same books. Have a good week!
I've never heard of this book but it sounds good.
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