Is Emily Janice Card's slow, measured narration a deliberate reflection of the slowing of the Earth's rotation that forms the backdrop of this novel? Card speaks even more slowly when she's portraying Real Timers, people who are trying to let their bodies’ circadian rhythms adjust to the new longer days and nights, and it's incredibly effective. The story unfurls like one endless summer day as protagonist Julia enters her own age of miracles, balancing on the cusp of young adulthood and watching her family's ordinary dramas unfolding in extraordinary times. Card's mild, young voice suits Julia, and it softens some of the horrors she and everyone else on the planet experience—mysteriously dying birds and whales, the sun's radiation let loose, a wholly uncertain future. J.M.D. 2013 Audies Winner © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
Karen Thompson Walker, author of Summer ’12 Discover pick The Age of Miracles talks about choosing her book’s title, “the hidden pleasure of apocalyptic stories,” and Charlotte Rogan’s debut novel, The Lifeboat, also a Summer ’12 Discover pick.
Tomorrow Tommy Wallach’s We All Looked Up will make impact in bookstores everywhere, crashing onto shelves in an epic explosion. Well. Okay, it won’t actually do that. But when you’re talking about a novel that features an asteroid hurtling toward the planet, it’s hard to resist comparing it to a speedy chunk of space rock.
It was the best of times, it was the end of times. Apocalyptic fiction and dystopias had their moment, but what happens after a cataclysm is only half the story. An arguably more interesting tale lies in the days before the collapse, when people must cope with the end of their lives as they know them. It’s in […]
To be clear, there’s no bad time of year to be a book nerd. There’s no season where it is less awesome to lose yourself in a new world, slip inside the skin of someone entirely new, encounter new ideas, and have your mind blown. I think we’re pretty much all on board with that. But […]
Recent buzz around the question of whether adults can read young adult lit without shame may have left you standing paralyzed over a copy of Harry Potter, waiting for a final verdict. I’m firmly on the side of “read what you want”—and must also point out the fact that there’s plenty of candy-coated lit on […]