Space travel is always an exciting yet perilous proposition. Similarly, this journey through space and time by Emily St. John Mandel is an exciting yet precarious way to create a novel. A simple mistake might have made this whole attempt a futile one. In this book, you will have to get yourself ready for a roller coaster ride transcending centuries, planets, and pandemics. "I think you'd want to visit all those points in time," Zoey said. “You’d want to speak with the letter writer in 19...

Breathtaking, mind-blowing, complex, serene, intelligent!These are the first words that come to mind as I finish this fascinating journey—easily one of the best books of 2022.The novel’s central question is far more intricate than it first appears.What would you do if you found yourself in the middle of a time corruption—an unexplainable derangement where moments bleed into and distort one another?Four people, scattered across different timelines, experience the same anomaly. Their fates converg...

A claustrophobic nautilus of a novel. The summary touts this as a time travel story but to me, it seemed less interested in time travel and more in a novelist's wistful musings on the harrowing transformation from *a writer, quiet observer of the world*, to *a writer, performing being a writer*— on what it means for her identity and time to be consumed as well as her novels. I understand why the summary lingers on time travel; there is plenty of it in this book. But to me the book really boils d...

“Isn’t that why we’re here? To leave a mark on wilderness?” I was one of the few readers (or so it seemed) left underwhelmed by Mandel's Station Eleven when I read it back in 2014. The hype and gushing reviews seemed at odds with the very okay novel I read, which is why I passed on reading The Glass Hotel.Now I'm wondering: should I go back and read the author's other stuff? Because I have to admit I found Sea of Tranquility riveting and beautiful.From what I remember, it is not stylistically...

I'm not sure how I feel about this one. It's very much a 'written during the pandemic' book. It also almost requires you to have already read The Glass Hotel, and it even has a passing reference to Station Eleven. But both of those prior books are better than this one in my opinion. The plot of this book felt like a hodge podge of ideas - life in outer space, the future, life as an author, living through a pandemic, and the morality of time travel. But what really threw me off was the almost com...

nothing makes me feel more dumb than reading a time travel book. lol. i have no idea what it is, but my brain just cant comprehend the concept enough to enjoy stories that use it as a plot device. which is such a shame because i really love ESJMs writing style - its just as lovely and lyrical in this as it is in her previous books. and i said before, when ESJM wrote about a ponzi scheme (one of the dullest topics on earth), that its not what her books say, but how they say it, that makes her sto...

Sea of Tranquility is told in shifting timelines with different characters. In the timeline with Mirella, there are a bunch of different characters introduced in a relatively short period of time. To add to the confusion of this, there is a character named Vincent. However, Vincent is a female. I kept reading the passage over and over, not understanding what I was missing because I thought “she” must be referring to someone else.The first 40% of this book was slow. However, by the 60% mark, I co...

One of my most anticipated new releases of the year, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, turned out to be a watered-down rewrite of Cloud Atlas. If I were David Mitchell, I don't know whether I'd feel flattered or just profoundly ripped off.Sea of Tranquility has exactly the same narrative structure as Cloud Atlas, consisting of interconnected stories that occur across different timelines, starting in the past and spanning into the future. Like Cloud Atlas, the opening storyline centers...

Be sure to visit Bantering Books to read all my latest reviews.“… what she found at that moment, as the lights of yet another ambulance flickered over the ceiling, was that it was possible to smile back. This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.”Emily St. John Mandel brought me out of a writing slump. This is the first book review I’ve written in months, and not only do I want to share my thoughts regarding her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility...

i do not know how to review this book.https://emmareadstoomuch.substack.com...even at the best of times, when i am absolutely on the ball and everything is perfect and life is going my way and i am organized and well stocked in cookies and persian cucumbers (the two best foods), the very best i can hope for in terms of how much time passes between when i read a book and when i review it is 3 weeks.but that's beside the point, because we are firmly in the two month category on this one.i just...d...