A review by notesbynnenna
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

4.0

I’d call this book speculative fiction- it explores what happens when a pandemic wipes out 99% of the population on Earth. It follows a few different characters and over time, you see how each of these characters is connected to the other. I don’t think it’s easy to weave together different narratives, but the author does it really well here. After the pandemic, there’s a group of actors and musicians who travel around performing Shakespeare plays. Their motto is “survival is insufficient.” To survive the pandemic is not enough- they want to keep sharing their art with what’s left of the world. A few other themes throughout the book are memory, society, artifacts, and celebrity.

I really enjoyed this. I thought Mandel’s writing was excellent and the whole premise really made me think. The great pandemic is just on the edge of plausible and I found myself wondering if I would survive if something like that happened. Also, I thought she was really skillful at jumping around in time and from character to character. I feel like it’s really easy to lose the reader when you have a non-linear narrative, but that wasn’t the case here. I’d definitely recommend this book and I’m looking forward to reading what she writes next.