The Age Of Miracles

Seth Moreno is the love of Julia’s adolescent life. He is “tall and quiet and always on his own, now stepping carefully of his skateboard and into the dirt, his dark hair falling into his eyes as he moved” (36). He is a skateboarder and can often be found riding around while kids wait for the bus. His mother passes away from breast cancer, and he is extremely sensitive when discussing this subject. His and Julia’s young love blossoms over the course of several months and parallels the deterioration of Earth. When they do come together, they are inseparable. Their romance, however, is short lived. Seth falls ill with an extreme case of “gravity sickness” to the point where he frequently gets nose bleeds and is unable to walk. Seth’s father decides that the two of them should move to Mexico, and Julia never sees or hears from Seth again. 

A former actress, Julia’s mother is now settled into a suburban existence with her husband and her daughter. She was once a great beauty, but her looks have somewhat faded with age. When “the slowing” begins, her first reaction is to focus on survival, and she hoards canned goods, condensed milk, and other non-perishables. As “the slowing” progresses, Helen struggles with the extreme symptoms of “gravity sickness” and uses alcohol to cope with the harsh reality humanity faces. 

Julia’s father is an OBGYN who specializes in delivering high-risk babies. Joel is a calm, quiet man who uses lies to not deal directly with the reality of “the slowing.” Although he is cheating on Julia’s mother with Sylvia, he continually strives to do what his best for his family, which at times requires being dishonest with them. Joel tells his daughter that life is essentially “a paradox” and that“ not everything is clear cut” (256). Instead of leaving with Sylvia, who is a “real-timer,” Joel stays with his family and takes care of his wife, who is mentally and physically deteriorating in the wake of “the slowing.”

Sylvia is Julia and Seth’s piano teacher. She is a naturalist and yoga enthusiast who lives across street from Julia’s family. Sylvia has red hair and “dark, serious eyes, and she never wore makeup. Her skin was smooth and tanned, her limbs dotted with freckles, the kind that seem submerged beneath skin, like crumbs sinking into milk” (75). Julia looks through her telescope and catches her father in an intimate moment with Sylvia. Despite this infidelity, Julia and Seth go to check on her during a “white night” because they had not seen Sylvia, a proclaimed “real-timer,” in some time.

Julia likes the way her grandfather “always said exactly what he thought” (60). He is an eccentric old man, who lives in a dilapidated house in a new housing complex because he refuses to comply with the developers’ demands to renovate. Not one to shy away from giving his opinion on any issue, he initially believes that“ the slowing” is part of an elaborate government conspiracy: “This is bullshit, anyway. [...] I figure it’s all a trick to take our minds off the Middle East’” (61). When Julia’s grandfather goes missing around the time of Julia’s twelfth birthday party, the family thinks he might have fled to Circadia, a real-timer colony. Later it is discovered that he is dead, having fatally injured his head in an accidental fall.

Hanna is the preteen daughter of a large Mormon family in Julia’s neighborhood and is Julia’s former best friend. After the onset of “the slowing,” Hanna moves with her family to be with the other Mormons in Salt Lake City, Utah. When Hanna later returns to California, she regards Julia as a stranger and not with the warmth of a long-standing friendship. Julia is perplexed by this change in her friend: “We’d been friends for years, but a new shyness had flowered between us. […] She’d only been gone for three weeks” (98). Hanna sits with Tracy, who is also a Mormon, instead of with Hanna. Hanna and Tracy even wear matching clothes, which solidifies Julia’s exclusion from them, both socially and religiously. The swift end to their friendship is Julia’s first loss in The Age of Miracles.