REVIEW: Station Eleven

By Denise @ Life With No Plot on September 7, 2023 • ( 0 )

About the Book

Title: Station Eleven

Author: Emily St. John Mandel

Series: none

Genre: Dystopian

Pages: 333

Edition Read: Paperback

Dates Read: March 6 – 8, 2023

Blurb: Set in the days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

Review

This was a re-read for me and I was surprised that I never reviewed it the first time around. Time to make up for that lapse, since this book is quite impressive.

Side note: does anyone else find it really strange to read dystopian fiction that is based around a pandemic now that we’ve been through one? Even though COVID wasn’t as destructive as the Georgia Flu was in this book (i.e. civilization didn’t completely fall apart), I can’t help but make comparisons between the way people reacted to it and reacted to COVID (although to be fair, Wanderers by Chuck Wendig was much worse in that regard – and I read that one back in February 2020).

Anyway, onto the story. One of the things I love best about Mandel’s writing is that it is very nonlinear, but still very easy to digest. I’ve read books before with twisting storylines and they can sometimes get confusing or hard to follow, but Mandel weaves everything together seamlessly. She does this in the other book of hers that I read as well (The Glass Hotel, review coming soon) so that must just be her style, but I really enjoyed it, seeing how all of these people connected.

Kirsten is a survivor to the core and probably the character that I most wanted to be like in the story. I would like to think that if civilization completely collapsed that one way I would try to deal with it would be to join a traveling group of artists and performers. That whole concept was just so captivating to me. The Prophet is a fairly scary antagonist, but is also not as big of a presence in the book as I expected. I did enjoy the twist about his identity though, which I will not spoil here – you have to discover that for yourself.

Even though a lot of the story is a bit bleak (it is dystopian, after all), there are always light moments. Friendship. Art. Music. Hope that the world is starting to recover and rebuild. Everything about the story is beautiful and so easy to get lost in. I’m so glad I gave this another read.

GoodReads rating: 5 stars