Winter is a shit time for hedgehogs. We live in a perpetual state of climate manipulation. My human set up a heating lamp in my cage with a complicated timer system to keep me at 80 degrees at all time. The fact that I’ve survived a hurricane and a freak snowstorm in the same week only makes this book more ominous. You see, it’s about a world that has stopped turning. Birds drop from the sky, bugs overpopulate, day is night and night is day, and scumbag dads sleep with their kid’s piano teachers. With everything that’s been happening recently, this book freaked me the fuck out. I’m sure you know that the disappearance of bees is a harbinger of the apocalypse, but did you know hedgehogs are in on that shit too? Scientists have noted that wild hedgehogs are taking longer and longer to wake up from hibernation, so obviously the next Ice Age is right around the corner. Julia, the narrator of Miracles is a pre-teen girl, but I couldn’t help but imagine Al Gore narrating the damn thing.

I guess it’s a good thing the story scared me shitless. This wasn’t one of those “life goes in the face of uncertainty” books because —hello— gravity sickness. And I appreciated that. There’s too much narcolepsy-inducing realism in literary fiction these days, if you ask me, and this was a nice change. Sometimes I need to be scared once in a while because even I admit that I am a smug bastard.

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