The Age of Miracles (Karen Thompson Walker)

There is a lot to like in this touching story of a girl on the edge of womanhood dealing with the usual teenage issues and also with the global catastrophe that may signal the end of the planet. For some unknown reason, the rotation of the earth begins to slow drastically. Really drastically - it gains over half an hour in the first day. This slowing continues at an unpredictable pace throughout the book, with a day stretching to well over 70 hours before the tale ends. Along with this unexplained shift in rotation, there is also an unexplained change in gravity, which apparently increases enough to interfere with the flight of birds and soccer balls but not with walking. The orbit of the moon also shifts, so that a solar eclipse that was supposed to occur in the Pacific instead happens unexpectedly in California. So although the main character is well drawn and her family and peer relationships are touchingly illuminated, I kept being thrown off by the cavalier disregard for the most fundamental nature of reality. My disbelief just wouldn't suspend enough for me to ignore conservation of momentum, or gravity, or orbital mechanics, and not all happening together. I kept getting thrown off by other minor but unforgivable gaffes as well. When Julia's best friend abandons her she says she missed her "like a phantom limb" - but phantom limbs are not something you miss, they are something you wish would go away. Strange things are happening to airplanes, and also to the astronauts on the space station "ten thousand times higher," but of course the orbit of the space station is about 250 miles up, less than a hundred times higher than a commercial jet. When the earth's magnetic field begins to break down (something that would, indeed, follow from the slowing of the earth's rotation), people hear and feel this sudden shift, which is nonsense. The bottom line is that I just couldn't shut off the part of my brain that kept scoffing at the science, which spoiled everything else for me, which is too bad, since the other stuff was pretty good.