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A review by meadhbh
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
5.0
Too often, reflective sci-fi like this has an unsatisfying ending. Wilder Girls, To Be Taught If Fortunate, The Immortal King Rao, Everything You Ever Wanted - these books are all great, but none of them quite managed to stick the landing for me.
Station Eleven does not fall into this trap. Across multiple decades and a global, world-ending pandemic, the lives of the book's cast of characters intersect in many different ways. All of it is connected to the incident right at the start of the book, the same day the pandemic comes to the US, when famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage.
This book came out in 2014. It's hard to say exactly how living through an actual global pandemic affected my reaction to this book, but I'm sure it did. Combined with the onset of sudden awareness of my own mortality that comes with being in your mid twenties, I think this was also the perfect time for me personally to read this book, and I will be thinking about it for a very long time.
Station Eleven does not fall into this trap. Across multiple decades and a global, world-ending pandemic, the lives of the book's cast of characters intersect in many different ways. All of it is connected to the incident right at the start of the book, the same day the pandemic comes to the US, when famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage.
This book came out in 2014. It's hard to say exactly how living through an actual global pandemic affected my reaction to this book, but I'm sure it did. Combined with the onset of sudden awareness of my own mortality that comes with being in your mid twenties, I think this was also the perfect time for me personally to read this book, and I will be thinking about it for a very long time.