Emily St. John Mandel | Book Chatter

Sea of Tranquility
By Emily St. John Mandel
Knopf, 9780593321447, April 2022, 272pp.

The Short of It:

Reading Mandel guarantees exploratory thought processes.

The Rest of It:

Summing this story up is not easy. It’s a little bit of everything. There’s space exploration in the form of airships to other worlds, time travel, very interesting characters who float between this world and the next. Really, the story asks the question, what if what we are living in is a simulation? A carefully constructed “reality” that is anything but real?

Sounds wild, right? It is and it’s fascinating the way Mandel takes these characters through different time periods. As with most time travel stories, changes made anywhere within the continuum impact things down the line. Mandel softly tiptoes around this as her characters are warned over and over again what the end result will be. And in the midst of all of this, one of those time periods involves a pandemic.

I really enjoyed this short novel. It provided so much food for thought and was really well done. If you loved Station Eleven, you will appreciate this story as well.

Source: Review copy provided by the publisher.
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

Station Eleven
By Emily St. John Mandel
(Knopf, Hardcover, 9780385353304, September 2014, 352pp.)

The Short of It:

Civilization ends and begins and through it all there is music and Shakespeare.

The Rest of It:

I’m not sure I can even sum this book up! This is a crazy good book but not in your typical sense of what crazy good is. It spans decades and begins with the death of an actor while he’s onstage during a production of King Lear. Through flashbacks, we get to know Arthur Leander, his loves, his personalities and all the relationships he’s touched in-between. His death on-stage is witnessed by many, including a child actor named Kristen, who later is part of the Traveling Symphony roaming what is left of civilization after a pandemic. The man who comes to his aid, and fails, also appears later in the story and is one of the first to figure out that the “flu” that everyone is coming down with, is not your average bug.

This story will haunt you. The visuals of a landscape changed by illness are chilling. I don’t want to scare anyone away from it so I will say this, it’s not your typical ‘end of the world’ scenario. You can read, even in the dead of night and not have nightmares but just the idea of art and music existing in such a wrecked and broken world is enough to blow your mind. Plus, the use of time is handled very well. I am not a huge fan of jumping back and forth in time to tell a story but the before and after in this one works to really give you an idea of just how much has changed.

Is there hope? Is it too bleak of a story? No. I think that the continuation of art in and of itself is a sign of something good. I’ve not read anything by this author before and I understand she has a few other books out. I will definitely check them out since I enjoyed this one so much.

Source: Sent to me by the publisher via Edelweiss.
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

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