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A review by skylarkelly242
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
adventurous
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
This book is about a flu epidemic that causes most of civilisation to collapse and become corrupt. The book starts with a tragic situation concerning the protagonist, and then jumps the timeline to the period before the tragedy happened, and then at the end of the book it circles back to the death. This novel is a full circle story, it isn't left on a cliffhanger. The main themes were tragedy, civilisation, survival, and death. Death and survival were very common themes throughout the novel.This is because of the epidemic causing citizens to die hastily, also causing a lot of society survival instincts to kick in. Society had to make a lot of important decisions concerning their life and well being. The beginning was the most interesting when the epidemic and flu were being talked about, but shortly after that the novel became a little too slow paced for me. I enjoyed reading about Jeevans preparations for the epidemic, liked how many trips he had to make to the food store while snow was falling and the store was about to close.
I like this book because it goes into depth about the characters relationships with one another. The characters change throughout the book because a lot of friendships and relationships often do not last, for many reasons. For me 1984 is similar to this because of the dystopian fiction, but it differs because Station Eleven jumps back and fourth, and it has different timelines. The one piece of symbolism that stuck through the whole book with me was the cloudy paperweight, I always thought it resembled the setting of the book because of the flu that spread. The point of this book shows survival between life and death. The take away message is that there is a chance of survival. A trigger warning may be useful before the protagonists death, because they died from a heart attack. I recommend this book if you like a novel that jumps around a lot, because there are quite a lot of storylines. My favourite part of this book was the dinner party. " There are ten guests here tonight, an intimate evening to celebrate both the anniversary and the opening weekend figures." The dinner party was full of drama thats why I liked it. A part of the book I didn't enjoy was the story of the Traveling Symphony I felt that it was very slow paced and kind of unnecessary. "There were moments around campfires when someone would say something invigorating about the importance of art, and everyone would find it easier to sleep that night." This shows basically what the Traveling Symphony would be doing and I just think that this storyline is unimportant to the book, we don't need to know about their campfire stories.
I like this book because it goes into depth about the characters relationships with one another. The characters change throughout the book because a lot of friendships and relationships often do not last, for many reasons. For me 1984 is similar to this because of the dystopian fiction, but it differs because Station Eleven jumps back and fourth, and it has different timelines. The one piece of symbolism that stuck through the whole book with me was the cloudy paperweight, I always thought it resembled the setting of the book because of the flu that spread. The point of this book shows survival between life and death. The take away message is that there is a chance of survival. A trigger warning may be useful before the protagonists death, because they died from a heart attack. I recommend this book if you like a novel that jumps around a lot, because there are quite a lot of storylines. My favourite part of this book was the dinner party. " There are ten guests here tonight, an intimate evening to celebrate both the anniversary and the opening weekend figures." The dinner party was full of drama thats why I liked it. A part of the book I didn't enjoy was the story of the Traveling Symphony I felt that it was very slow paced and kind of unnecessary. "There were moments around campfires when someone would say something invigorating about the importance of art, and everyone would find it easier to sleep that night." This shows basically what the Traveling Symphony would be doing and I just think that this storyline is unimportant to the book, we don't need to know about their campfire stories.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cursing and Death