Review: Station Eleven

Title: Station Eleven

Author: Emily St. John Mandel

Date Completed: 27 March 2016

I'm still sitting here mulling over Station Eleven. I idiosyncratically avoided reading this book until the "buzz" died down, but now totally understand why it captured so many imaginations. It leaves you wondering what if...

The collapse happened sometime in the 2010s; a strain of influenza kills 99% of humanity in just a few weeks. The narrative weaves strands of characters' lives pre-collapse and shifts to 20 years after of the world as we know it ended. The adult characters remembering the modern world and the children growing up in a subsistence culture. The clash of generations reversed and in the midst of it all a traveling symphony/theatrical group who's motto is: "Survival is insufficient," and a self-proclaimed "prophet" that is gaining power through force and threatens to tear apart the fragile rebirth of civilization.

I won't say more for fear of spoiling the pleasure of reading Mandel's novel. Her writing is excellent; this is probably the most literary science fiction/dystopian novel I've read in recent years. It is not often I read a genre book where I am struck by how beautiful the sentences are as opposed to reveling in the plot. Definitely pick up this book if you'd like to mentally explore a world were the "delicate infrastructure of people" disappears.