Praise continues to roll in for Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles (Random House, 6/26; RH Audio; Thorndike Large Print, Aug), a novel that imagines what would happen if the earth’s rotation slowed. It’s a People Pick in new issue of the magazine (7/9). The reviewer says the author, “matches the fierce creativity of her imagination with a lyrical and portentous understanding of the present” but  “the tender heart — and hope — of the story is its narrator, Julia, a lonely, wise 11-year-old grappling with the normal challenges of growing up while the world is literally disintegrating around her.”

There is one nay-sayer, however. Ron Charles in the Washington Post, calls The Age of Miracles “Too dull for the YA market, it’s been dressed up as an affecting literary novel for adults, one of the more depressing trends in modern publishing.”

Library holds are heavy in many areas, similar to the number that were on Defending Jacob, William Landay (RH/Delacorte; 1/31) when it was first released. It debuted on the NYT best seller list at #4. Most libraries are still showing holds on that title, despite increasing the number of copies.

After the jump, a look at People‘s Picks so far this year:

Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel, Macmillan/Holt

Home, Toni Morrison, RH/Knopf

Waiting for Sunrise, William Boyd, Harper

The Red Book, Deborah Copaken Kogan, Hyperion

Carry the One, Carol Anshaw, S&S

Wild, Cheryl Strayed, RH/Knopf

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo, Random House

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2012 at 9:51 am and is filed under 2012 -- Summer, Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.