Everyone else has very eloquently summarized the plot of Station Eleven the first hundred times it was reviewed, so I’ll let Goodreads do the heavy lifting here (this is a half joke because I let Goodreads do the heavy lifting a lot of the time even when I’m not the last person in line to review a book): “One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and […]
I Regret Nothing
To talk about this book, I have to talk about my feelings about the novel The Road. I didn’t like The Road. The writing was very Cormac McCarthyesque and all that, and it was atmospheric but I didn’t enjoy reading The Road… because it was so damn depressing. While it was realistic and well written, it was just brutal. Station Eleven deals with a similar start (something wipes out society as we know it),however, the way the characters are portrayed and deal with their cataclysmic new […]
There’s No Place Like Home
This 2014 National Book Award Finalist is a beautiful affirmation of hope in the face of devastating loss and upheaval. Station Eleven is often characterized as an apocalyptic novel, but I believe this term is too limiting and does a disservice to the author. While the destruction of civilization is at the core of the plot, Mandel is more concerned with the creation of a new world than the destruction of the old one. This is a novel about resilience, about knowing what to hold […]
“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”
First, some things you should know about me, for like, context and stuff: 1. I usually avoid apocalypse books like the plague (or more apropos, the Georgia Flu). Most of the time, even thinking about apocalyptic situations makes me panic. 2. I am a Shakespeare nerd. 3. I am a Star Trek nerd. 4. I cannot explain why I loved this book so much, because most of my reaction was completely sub-conscious. I have gotten gradually more stingy with my five star reviews since I […]
Because Survival Is Insufficient
Oh God, this book….this wonderful, wonderful book. The present-day world is crumbling as a deadly flu pandemic spreads like wild-fire and kills its victims in under 48 hours. Within weeks the entirety of modern civilization has been reduced to buildings full of corpses and eternal traffic jams of driverless cars. Air travel is history, satellites go down, the internet disappears, lights go out, and the world is plunged into the literal dark ages. So why is this wonderful? Mandel takes what could be just another […]
A Time Worth Living In
You guys and gals should prepare yourself for even more reviews about Station Eleven. It’s simply fantastic. I’m rating it 4.5 stars and leaving myself the option of bumping it up to 5 stars later . I still don’t know because I’m too busy rolling around in all the feels. (And I have, because the further removed from the reading the MORE I have fallen in love with the work.) I have the impression that I’ve been reading a lot of dystopian future books lately. […]