Editor’s Picks

Going away to college is often touted as one of the defining times in a young person’s life, a period in which they are no longer under the supervision of their parents and placed in an environment that can’t help but change them.  As cliche as this vision of academia seems, that’s exactly the situation of freshman Joyce Brown, one of the leading players in David Willis’s slice-of-life dramedy Dumbing of Age, which is set entirely on the campus of Indiana University.

Joyce (like Willis himself) has been raised in a loving but sheltered and strict fundamentalist Christian home and is attending school to, in her own words “hunt down the wonderful, godly man [she] will someday marry.” But Joyce’s worldviews will be tested and turned upside down by a widely diverse and intricate cast of characters. These include Joyce’s misanthropic roommate, her Yale-bound new best friend who happens to be an atheist, her rebellious convicted felon neighbor, their despot of an RA, and an emotionally unstable girl masquerading as a caped crusader (or is it the other way around?)–and those are just the people on her floor!

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Anyone who’s spent time in a foreign country can tell you that culture shock is a real thing.  While perhaps not as romantic and alienating as moody cinema might have you believe, there’s a never-ending adjustment period in which you find yourself faced with situations you never would have considered before your arrival (ask anyone who’s had to use a Japanese squat toilet).

Nowhere is this more obvious than the adorable and irreverent comics of Mary Cagle, who has for the past two years been chronicling her time as an English teacher in a small-town Japanese primary school under the title Let’s Speak English. Cagle, who in addition to teaching also works as an illustrator, writer, and colorist on a multitude of comics, illustrates Let’s Speak English in the traditional Japanese comic format called 4-koma (ie: four black and white panels stacked atop each other) and makes full use of the medium to tell short, witty, and only slightly embarrassing stories of her daily interactions with her students, coworkers, and neighbors.

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If it weren’t for all the past critical praise for The Age of Miracles, it might have been a hard recommendation to sell. A coming of age story set amongst a backdrop of a dystopian, dying world? Surely we’ve all heard this story before. Thanks to The Hunger Games and Divergent, most book readers probably aren’t in a rush to read another story like it either. But The Age of Miracles’ approach to sci-fi and blossoming teenagers is anything but cliche. If anything, its speculative nature proves that sometimes human beings do strange things when faced with things they can’t control.

Despite being a story about the “end of the world,” the novel moves at a lingering pace. The calamity in Karen Thompson Walker’s novel can’t be killed or destroyed in a war, and so the events that unfold echo the actions of its characters, who move with uncertainty against an inevitable black death. In Miracles, the disaster is the slowing of Earth’s rotation, resulting in longer days that have catastrophic effects in both nature and biology.

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