Christina

First of all, yes, this is a singularly strange book: Miri's beloved wife Leah has finally returned from a deep-sea exploration gone wrong, and she seems to slowly but surely be turning into some kind of ocean creature. The story alternates between Miri's and Leah's perspectives, but we never hear from Leah once she surfaces - we only learn, in bits and pieces that jigsaw-puzzle together around holes never quite filled in, what might have happened in that dark and crushing pressure at the bottom of the sea.

If pushed to describe it, I'd say imagine vestiges of the plot from Dr. Franklin's Island (Ann Halam), with the stunned disbelief - articulated in the most hauntingly beautiful ways - of finding oneself in a completely new reality from Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel), with amassing undertones of the amorphous dread so compellingly conveyed in Leave the World Behind (Rumaan Alam).

While the plot is extraordinary in every sense of the word, the story manages to be deeply, heartbreakingly relatable. Ambiguous loss - the specific type of grief you feel when the person you love still exists, in a sense, but isn't the same - is universal, and this eerie and beautiful book is fundamentally about it.

I loved this book and believe it will be one of the most-discussed, most-acclaimed of 2022.

One of the greatest pleasures of being alive is reading Emily St. John Mandel.

I tried - I really did - to savor this; I read and reread it in one sitting.

How can I describe it? When I was young, my Greek Sunday School teacher asked us to share the most awe-inspiring thing we'd ever experienced. I think she was hoping for an answer alluding to the religious, but I talked about looking out the window of a plane, seeing the vastness and the specifics - one red-roofed house here, a winding road with cars like ants there - all at the same time. Grasping that (to paraphrase) there was so much world, and that each and every person in it had their own inner thoughts and wants and fears just like I did. Reeling, simultaneously stunned and soothed by the universality of it all. Having just finished it for the second time, Sea of Tranquility - set across and within times and spaces and lives - feels something like that.

I love Emily St. John Mandel's previous novels so much I worried this one couldn't possibly continue to live up. It did, and more.

Was pleasantly surprised by this book - the plot was compelling AND the writing was strong (I feel like with many thrillers, the writing is so clunky or overwrought it takes me out of the story). In this sense, it reminded me of Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll. The twists and turns made sense, but I didn't see them coming. I really enjoyed the experience of reading this - I started and finished in the same sitting.