Reviews with content warning for Confinement - Sea of Tranquility

I really like Emily St John Mandel's writing style, although as I said I'm my review of station 11- I can see it isn't for everyone.
There's an obvious author insert character which I wasn't sure about at first but I came round to it.
The first few chapters meander and you have to wait for it to come together, it did for me and it was beautiful

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jhbandcats's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Wow, what an extraordinary novel. Time travel novels seem really hard to do without glaring anomalies in the timeline. I’m in awe of people who even try to come up with such complex stories. (The Time Traveler’s Wife is a successful one.)

The feel of the book is like Mandel’s Station Eleven - so many tiny revelations of connection and meaning. The format is like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas where the first and last sections are the same story, the second and next-to-last are the same story, and so on, finally meeting in the middle. It’s a fascinating way to tell a tale - there are so many subtle intricacies.

I enjoyed Mandel’s sardonic humor in her references to what clearly had been her own experience: being queried at readings in 2020-2021 about her prescient pandemic storyline in Station Eleven, her bewilderment that her first books passed under the radar till Station Eleven hit it big and she was suddenly famous.

I think this book is just fabulous. It’s a beautiful story about humanity across the centuries.

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novella42's review

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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maelikesbooks's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

I don’t usually like time travel stories, but this was a perfect one.

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pearlisarobot's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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theverycraftyvegan's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I would give this book 10/5 if I could. It’s so beautifully written that “perfect” is the best way to describe it. This is science fiction that is so deeply based on reality that it is 100% believable. This could be our future. This might *need* to be our future. It was a little confusing at the start, because we spend only a little time with each character, but by the half way point I was enthralled. I loved how all the characters tied in together and the ending was *chef’s kiss*.

I will definitely be reading more of Emily St John Mandel.

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novi's review

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emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot

4.0

if you like reading about time travel, you should read this book.

honestly i started reading this because i really like the first part of this book, which was of edwin, a pragmatic and woke guy from 1912. it was cozy. but this book is not cozy.

one of the things that i don't like from science fiction genre is the futuristic and desert-y settings. this book has it, that atmosphere was really thick in the year of 2203. it was so monotonous but after that it's fine. actually the part after that was where the actual plot was finally clear and i couldn't stop reading from that point.

there are twists and turns in this book, because the timeline of this book is literally not linear. some of the twists gave me goosebumps. i would say that to made those twists, there are some plot holes, and there are things that i still don't understand or not explained in this book.

but all in all it's a book about time travel that explores how that affect humans' lives, and "are we living in a simulation?". Some parts of the book got depressing (war, pandemic, imprisonment), which is not my favorite, but it's a literary so it's kind of a given, and this is a short book, so those moments didn't lasts very long, at least.

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