Think back to when you were around 12 years old, when you had to navigate in a world that involved braces, boy/girl parties and first crushes. Now picture facing all those obstacles and waking one morning to find out that the rotation of the Earth is slowing. That scenario is the premise of Karen Walker Thompson’s stunning debut, “The Age of Miracles“.

You might recall that my Mom provided some foreshadowing about this novel back in the beginning of March when she said,

Julia speaks for the world in this brilliant book. Karen Thompson Walker will have you rethinking wasting anything… fuel, electricity or precious time.

My Mother has always had impeccable taste in literature and she’s never lead me down the wrong path, so I knew that I had to pick up “The Age of Miracles” as soon as she set it down.

Up until the slowing, Julia’s lived a relatively typical lifestyle, her Mother and Father are happily married, her best friend Hannah has the ability to finish her sentences and she goes weak in the knees whenever she sees Seth Moreno at the school bus stop. However, when the Earth begins to slow, the planet Earth isn’t the only thing out of order. Julia’s world is turned upside down as everything she’s ever known is out of sync and she and the rest of society are well aware that things will never be the same again.

The slowing, we soon came to understand, had altered gravity. Afterward, the earth held a little more sway. Bodies in motion were slightly less likely to remain in motion. We were all of us and everything a little more susceptible to the pull of the ground.

In the face of the Apocalypse stands a young girl who’s trying to figure it all out. When you throw a wrench in a well oiled machine, your bound to have problems and this is exactly what happens to Julia’s not so ordinary world. She goes from a care free young lady, to a scared, lonely, young lady who’s left to figure things out independently. Sure, her parents are there to help “guide” her along the way, but they have no clue what tomorrow will bring either, so this novel takes on a whole new meaning of the term “coming of age”.

Karen Thompson Walker has written a beautiful debut and it’s already been announced that this novel will be adapted into a film. My secret hope is that Julia is played by Elle Fanning, because that’s who I envisioned the whole time I read the novel. Take it from my Mother and I, you’re going to want to read this book, because it’s unlike anything you’ve read before.