Nothing to see here, move along.
You know those things that other people rave about; organic wine,  paleo bars and Ed Burns movies, yeah, they're nice, but seriously, you aren't jumping up and down with excitement about?<br /><br />That's how I feel about The Age of Miracles.  It's a story about a girl whose self absorbed parents are heading for a bitter, acrimonious and obvious breaking point.  Oh, also, the days and nights are getting longer and it's making people act strange, mostly PG rated strange, yelling, gardening at night, etc.<br /><br />Some extra details are thrown in for artistic accuracy, the girl has no boobs (pretty much all heroines are boobless, yet appealing), she has a tarty friend (who has too much boobage, boobs = slutty, in literature), she has a crush on an emotionally damaged boy, momma is shrill, grandpa is crazy/wise and dad is cold and oblivious.<br /><br />Wait, but it's a bunch of pages long, what about all the rest of the story?<br /><br />Weelllllll, I mostly forgot.  I know, I know, how can I write a review for a book I've mostly forgotten?<br /><br />Here's how, I'm just going to list some of the highlights and what I thought about them, because for me the story isn't so much as story but a series of events loosely linked by an unreliable narrator, unreliable because she's supposed to be a kid, but instead she sounds like a graduate student who has a fondness for poetry, kambucha and jazz.  In other words, she seemed old to me.<br /><br />1.  The days slow down.  This is your basic art-y coming of age story told as a backstory to when everything went to hell.  There's a scifi spin that never pays off and the ending is so typically nihilistic and depressing, I had to laugh about it later.  It reminded me a little bit of an old horror flick called, Sleepaway Camp, the description read something like this, 'Dear Mom and Dad,  Camp is okay, but there's been a few murders.  I'm scared.  I think I hear someone coming, arrhhhghh!' . . .blood runs down the page of the letter indicating to the reader, that indeed someone was coming and they turned out to be a crazed, camper killer.  I'm sure there's a name for this trope (inevitable death and depression, something like that), I just can't remember it.  Anyways, I don't like it.<br /><br />2.  Romance.  I love romance, but this one was just so blah, I wasn't really feeling it.  Not even with the implication that the Apocolypse had heightened emotions.<br /><br />3.  Mom and Dad.  There was so much time spent on them that it was a bit of a letdown that instead of letting them move on from each other, they got roped back into being a loving couple again, seemingly by a miracle (the miracle itself is never shown, I guess we as the readers have to assume that the ways of adults are too mysterious for the mind of preteen to even speculate on, much less describe to us).<br /><br />4.  Hanna, aka, mean religious girl.  I think she was meant as a reminder to the reader that while some things change other things end up in Utah because they are just too darn crazy.<br /><br />Well, that's about it.  I know a lot of people love this book, but it just wasn't my style of storytelling or story.  the book was a fast read and had no editing flaws and the pacing was pretty good for a story of this length.