Ken Rockburn's blog

This was the book so far this summer that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.
The Age of Miracles is the story, told in the first person by 11-year-old Julia, about the circumstances of her life, and the lives of the rest of the world, when – for unexplained reasons – the Earth’s rotation begins to slow down. The effects are omni-present and omni-directional: sunrise and sunset take place at unexpected times; days go from 24 hours to 32 to 48 to whatever; gravity deepens resulting in birds falling from the sky and, less importantly (or more, depending on your inclination), baseball turns into lawn bowling; whales and dolphins beach themselves in what could be mass suicides due to the shifting of currents and magnetic fields; trees and plants die, and this includes crops.

Perhaps the first clue to the contents of this expanded tabloid article by Christopher Andersen is the absence of the log-rolling praise from fellow authors that are traditionally plastered all over the dust jackets of books in this genre.

The second clue would have been the cover itself, a blatant rip-off of the design used in Charles R. Cross's 2005 biography of Jimi Hendrix, Room Full of Mirrors; the off-centre, black-and-white close up of the subject's face.