Sea of Tranquility

Station Eleven is my favorite book, so I was excited to read this new one from Emily St. John Mandel. When I heard that this book had a split timeline and multiple protagonists, I was especially optimistic since I believe she does that very well. Sea of Tranquility does that almost as well and is a tidy, quick, slightly surreal read.

It's pretty in the way that you would expect from her, and it's fun to see authors try things that are very different. This is one of the first books I've read that was written entirely in a Covid world, which shows up a lot. I've always thought I had one of the more surreal experiences of the early days of Covid since I read Station Eleven over Christmas of 2019 and it freaked me out to see its exact plotline start happening. But I'm sure it was much more surreal and terrifying for Emily Mandel since it likely felt like she wrote the pandemic into existence in some way... One of the characters here is an author who goes through a similar experience and I'm sure lots of those anecdotes came from her real-world experience with that. I also recently read Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, which has a somewhat similar premise of multiple protagonists and timelines, and had a similar takeaway: it makes perfect sense that books written during the pandemic will be more surreal and confused about time and perspective. I wonder how future decades will look at the fiction from this era and what themes will stand out. (This book was more cohesive than Cloud Cuckoo Land, which felt like 3 separate novellas stitched together).

I thought the time travel aspects were clever and served the plot instead of being a distraction. She also follows the best logical approach of how time travel works and pulls things together into a pretty satisfying, slick ending that makes the pieces click together.

Not her best work, but still worth a read.