Book #6 of 2023: The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel This sophomore work from 2010 is definitely an Emily St. John Mandel title, displaying that author’s trademark tendency towards a narrative that unfolds nonlinearly, disclosing new elements of explanatory character backstory well after we’ve been following the cast’s foibles in the present day. …
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Book #192 of 2022: Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel There are hints in this 2009 debut novel from author Emily St. John Mandel of the talents she’d bring to later works like Station Eleven, but on the whole, it’s a bit miserable. This is a story about sad people acting inexplicably …
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Book #60 of 2022: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel This sci-fi novel starts off pretty disjointedly, repeatedly jumping ahead by literal centuries (1912, 2020, 2203) to no immediately discernible purpose or connection between successive protagonists. If not for the overall shortness of the volume and for my abiding affection towards author Emily …
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Book #79 of 2020: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel As in her earlier Station Eleven, author Emily St. John Mandel has a real talent for crafting lifelike protagonists whose personal struggles are deeply compelling to watch unfold. Here, however, I feel as though those threads are too often truncated individually, and too …
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Book #43 of 2019: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel I love this book just as much as I remember, and upon this reading I’m particularly struck by the quiet tone of the work. It’s all too easy for a writer of this sort of world-ending saga to lean on the action and the …
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Book #57 of 2015: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel Following in the tradition of George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides and Stephen King’s The Stand, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven spins a tale of our modern society collapsing and rebuilding itself in the wake of a calamitous plague that kills off much of …
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