69 pages • 2 hours read
Karen Thompson WalkerThe Age Of Miracles
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The book opens in October, with narrator and protagonist Julia. She reflects on “the slowing,” and explains, “We didn’t notice right away. We couldn’t feel it” (3). In this brief two-page chapter, the context for “the slowing” is painted in broad strokes. Julia details how people “were distracted back then by weather and war” and “had no interest in the turning of the earth” (3). Days lengthen only by minutes at first, and Julia recalls how the “days had grown by fifty-six minutes in the night” (4). With this unprecedented natural disaster, “the freeways clogged immediately. People heard the news, and they wanted to move” (4). People try to flee cities en masse, but given that the crisis is an Earth-wide phenomenon, there is nowhere else to go.
Chapter 2 Summary
Julia is a shy sixth grader who lives with her mother and father in a quiet suburban neighborhood in California. The news of “the slowing”—what it is and how little scientists know about it—breaks on a Saturday morning.
Julia’s best friend, Hanna, is at Julia’s house, and the girls are just waking up after a sleepover. Hanna mentions she had a strange dream the night before. With “the slowing” still in its early stages, life goes on as usual. Julia’s parents spend the morning reading the newspaper at their dining room table, with her mother in a green bathrobe and her father reading every news story out of order. The family has two cats, who both begin to act a bit strangely. Julia thinks, “[T]he cats sensed the change before we did. They were Siamese, but different breeds” (7).
Everyone is unsure of how to handle the news of “the slowing.” Hanna returns to her home after their sleepover to be with her family and to see what they will do in response to the alarming news report.
Chapter 3 Summary
As California natives, Julia’s family is used to natural disasters in the form of earthquakes: “We were Californians and thus accustomed to the motions of the earth. We understood that the ground could shift and shudder” (10). Julia’s mother is a worrier, and as soon as “the slowing” begins, she starts planning for disaster: “In the kitchen, my mother was already scanning the shelves for essentials, swinging cupboards on hinges and inspecting the contents of drawers” (11).
Hanna is from a large Mormon family and grew up in a house that “was full of sisters,” but Julia’s “was the home of only one child” (11). Julia “never liked it when [Hanna] left” because “the rooms felt too quiet without her” (11), and as an only child at home and one of the less kids at school, Julia often feels lonely.
In the wake of news about “the slowing,” Julia completely forgets to attend soccer practice and later finds out that Michaela is the only one of her teammates to show up to the field. Michaela’s mother is unlike the other suburbanite mothers in that she is young and single, frequently has boyfriends, and lives in an apartment rather than a house.
Every network on television broadcasts nonstop information about the planetary event. Julia’s parents each react differently to the news. While Helen’s instinct is to hoard emergency supplies, Joel tries to remain calm and pretend like “the slowing” isn’t happening. He suggests that he and Julia go outside and play soccer, rather than watch the barrage of news coverage.
Julia’s piano teacher, Sylvia, lives across the street. Julia admires the brazen woman and thinks: “Sylvia was cool and wispy and she smelled like lotion. Her limbs were lanky, like the branches of eucalyptus trees, and were often encircled in chunky turquoise jewelry, which she removed at the beginning of each of my piano lessons in order to commune more closely with the keys. She always played piano barefoot” (22). Sylvia is not concerned about “the slowing” because she is a naturalist and takes a “whatever will be, will be” approach to Earth’s shifting rotation.
That night, Julia’s father is late coming home from work, and Julia’s mother becomes increasingly panicky, wondering where he is and if something bad has happened to him. Julia’s father is an OBGYN who specializes in delivering high-risk babies, and he often works late hours and emergency shifts at a local hospital. Joel is late because a woman died in childbirth—an extremely rare occurrence. Julia knows that it is unusual for someone to die under her father’s care, and “for some reason, it was right then and not earlier that [she] really began to worry” (29).
Julia also receives a call from Hanna that night in which Hanna informs her that she and her family are moving to Salt Lake City, where many Mormons have gathered since “the slowing” began. Julia is distraught by this news.
The chapter closes with Julia noticing a dead blue jay on their deck in the backyard. Helen dismisses the bird’s death and instructs Julia not to touch it and to instead leave it for Joel to dispose of when he returns.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The narration of The Age of Miracles is told from the first-person perspective of Julia, which gives the book an intimate feel. The narration is also told retrospectively in the past tense, which gives an objective distance to the story as well. Throughout the book, Julia frequently makes mention of a lesson that was only learned in hindsight: “We didn’t notice right away. We couldn’t feel it” (3). The narration is also unique in that it is unclear what vantage point Julia is speaking from. She tells this story from an unknown time and place in the future, looking backward.
The first three chapters set the scene for a far-reaching natural disaster where in “the beginning, people stood on street corners and shouted about the end of the world” (4).School counselors come to talk to the children about the global catastrophe. People are panicked and “scurried in every direction like small animals suddenly caught under light. But, of course, there was nowhere on earth to go” (4). In The Age of Miracles, society’s frantic reaction to “the slowing” mirrors a realistic response to modern-day crises.
In these early chapters, the importance of the friendship between Hanna and Julia is established. Julia observes that “from [Hanna’s] slim writs there jingled a charm bracelet crowded with charms. Among them: one half of a small brass heart, the other half of which belonged to me” (6). Julia frequently feels lonely and has “grown expert at diplomacy as only an only child can” (18) when he parents are at odds. While many preteens experience some sort of social isolation, Julia’s social difficulties are at the forefront of her identity. Hanna hurriedly leaving the sleepover at Julia’s once the news breaks marks the beginning of Julia systematically losing those closest to her.
Religion’s significance in society surfaces as a prominent theme of the novel, which first becomes apparent in Julia’s neighborhood. The neighbors in Julia’s subdivision represent different belief systems, both secular and nonsecular, and convey their own underlying philosophies on life. Julia is a part of a well-to-do liberal family with modern beliefs. The Kaplans, a conservative Jewish family, mostly keep to themselves. Tom and Carlotta are an aging hippie couple who live across the street, and their next-door neighbor is Sylvia, a New Age piano instructor. Each family is poised to have its own reaction to the news of “the slowing” as the story progresses.
Julia observes the blue jay that struck their kitchen window and dropped to the deck, it’s neck seemingly broken. While her mother doesn’t want to believe that the animal is dead—“maybe it’s just stunned” (26)—Julia is skeptical. The death of the blue jay foreshadows the emergence of even greater after-effects of “the slowing” for humanity: a shift in gravity. When her father returns home, Julia hears about the woman who died, and thinks that the death is “as impossible now as polio or the plague” (29). The unlikelihood of the woman who died in labor in conjunction with the sudden death of the bird culminate to set a foreboding tone, indicating that even the impossible is possible. Julia comments that humanity has “worried over the wrong things” and that “the real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown” (29). The close of Chapter 3 lays the foundation for Julia’s arduous coming-of-age journey, both internally and externally, for which is not prepared.
