Emily St. John Mandel's previous novels include The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, has been translated into thirty-two languages, and is the basis for the HBO Max series by the same name. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter. You can find her online at emilymandel.com.
In this captivating tale of imagination and ambition, a seemingly disparate array of people come into contact with a time traveller who must resist the pull to change the past and the future. The cast includes a British exile on the west coast of Canada in the early 1900s; the author of a bestselling novel about a fictional pandemic who embarks on a galaxy-spanning book tour during the outbreak of an actual pandemic; a resident of a moon colony almost 300 years in the future; and a lonely girl who films an old-growth forest and experiences a disruption in the recording. Blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, Emily St. John Mandel's dazzling story follows these engrossing characters across space and time as their lives ultimately intersect. Sea of Tranquility is a breathtaking and wondrous examination of the ties that bind us together, by a master storyteller.
I really do love stories that are character driven, and ones in which the different threads across time converge near the end. Sea of Tranquility is sort of like Cloud Cuckoo Land, although I would say that Anthony Doerr's work immerses readers a bit more than Mandel's does. Regardless, Mandel is able to build a cast of characters (some of whom come from her previous works) in order to thread together a narrative that is more than the sum of its parts.
I'm really obsessed with books that have a strong temporal component to them, and Sea of Tranquility absolutely does. One grapples with the Time Institute, and thinking about what the future (two hundred, three hundred years into the future) looks like. As you get closer and closer to the end, you'll also start to see how time is so important in understanding the anomaly, but I don't want to spoil anything!
Despite loving stories like this, Sea of Tranquility was just missing two things for me that would have made it the best type of read. The first is that Mandel utilized characters from her other works in order to pull this off. While I understand the desire to return to other characters, I wasn't entirely sure why she had to, instead of crafting other characters and other stories. I felt lost at Vincent's and Merilla's introduction at the beginning, because I was not familiar with them; and if one does not have to read The Glass Hotel before reading Sea of Tranquility, I did wonder why Mandel utilized those characters in the first place. And secondly, I don't think Mandel leaned strong enough into the ending as she could have; I would have liked to see the author Olive one more time, and I would have liked our narrator to explain a bit more fully how he came to the realization that he did about the anomaly, because I'm not quite as smart as he is.
Regardless, Sea of Tranquility was a fascinating read, and some of the quotes will stick with me for a while longer. It definitely makes me want to look at Mandel's other work! Until then, you can find her online at emilymandel.com.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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