Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Title: Sea of Tranquility

Author: Emily St. John Mandel

Publisher: Knopf 2022

Genre: Speculative Fiction

Pages: 255

Rating: 5/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Unread Shelf; Unread Shelf RC - June (About a journey)

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

I picked this one for book club on the strengths of Mandel’s earlier work, Station Eleven. I really disliked her work The Glass Hotel, but hoped that the new one was return to the type pf story I love. And it definitely delivered. We get a speculative fiction story that’s ultimately about the human experience. As we piece together the larger narrative story, we get to connect to different people and time periods only to realize that each story shares many element of life. We get to see how people struggle with identity and family. We see characters wrestle with the concept of mortality. And we see characters embrace joy. This book isn’t very long, but it packs a punch. I’ll be thinking about scenes and quotes in this book for months to come. I would’t be surprised if it makes it to my Top 10 of 2022.

Next up on the TBR pile:

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Title: The Glass Hotel

Author: Emily St. John Mandel

Publisher: Knopf 2020

Genre: Literary Fiction

Pages: 321

Rating: 3/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Ebook

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: "Why don't you swallow broken glass." High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients' accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan's wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.

I was so incredibly excited to read this one. I adored Station Eleven and was looking forward to Mandel’s next piece of fiction. Unfortunately this one felt so incredibly flat to me. There’s hardly any plot to speak of, but that was to be expected from her previous work. I didn’t think I was going to read a plot-driven book and that would have been okay. I need to really dive into the lives of interesting characters. This book did not have any. Every single character we met was terrible. I couldn’t root for any of them. I couldn’t make myself care about any of them. I just wanted them all to go away. Beyond that, I’ve found that I really don’t care about reading books where rich people behave badly. I just don’t care. I found no hope in this book. Definitely not for me at all.

Next up on the TBR pile:

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Title: Station Eleven

Author: Emily St. John Mandel

Publisher: Knopf Books 2014

Genre: Fantasy -- post-apocalypse

Pages: 333

Rating:  5/5 stars

Reading Challenges: I Love Libraries; Popsugar - Dystopian Novel (although I would classify as post-apocalyptic...); Women Authors

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.

I've heard such great things about this book. Finally picked it up at the library as one of my random choices for February. I sped through this one, reading it in two days while home sick. At first, I felt like Mandel was telling too many unrelated stories, but quickly it became apparent that all these stories were connected. We just had to dig into these characters to see the connections. Pretty soon, I was deep into their characters and their survival (or non-survival as the case may be). I was fascinated by the recurring appearance of water and its importance to the character. I loved the Shakespeare connection. While the plot focuses on survival in a post-apocalyptic world, I felt like the book was really focused on the human condition. We dug deep into these characters, finding out their motivations, secrets, and dreams. I loved it! Kirsten was such a great main character. I wanted to spend so much more time with her. Highly recommend.