Review 363: Station Eleven

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked that the horrors of what people had to do at first to survive were left alone, not described, and some characters didn't remember those times. The counting of years was post the major event, the flu that wiped out the mass of population.

This was a book I wanted to read for a long while, happy to have finally gotten to it. Of course, during the recent pandemic I wasn't sure I wanted to explore this fictional world. Happily the real world wasn't nearly as devastating.

With the number of major characters and jumping around in time, it made the book feel there were masses of pages left on the cutting room floor. This easily could have been a much longer work. I kept wondering why the focus was around Arther lealand, the actor who dies of a heartache on stage the day the virus hit? But you need to have an anchor somewhere.