Walker's idea is very interesting, but the execution less so. Julia is an ordinary Californian teenager, waking up with her friend Hanna from a sleepover to another sunny morning. But everything has changed, the spin of the earth is slowing. Hanna's Mormon family leave for Utah to receive guidance from their leaders and when she returns their friendship has shattered apart. Julia's loneliness and her longing for the boy next door, Seth, is set against a landscape of unfolding horrors. The days continue to lengthen, becoming lethally hot, the night temperatures dipping to below freezing. The magnetosphere falters and fails, unleashing radiation onto the Earth's surface, and flora and fauna begin to die.

This would have been excellent as an epic, but it feels slight and not worked out.  Walker's use of an ordinary teenage life with the horrors of high school, adolescene and the tensions of tensions within her own family and divided loyalties is a refreshing angle. It was a brilliant idea but so disappointing in the end, I wanted to know more!