Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Title: Station Eleven Author: Emily St. John Mandel Date Read: May 7 2017  Published: September 9 2014 @ Knopf Genre: Adult Dystopian Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.” This story follows several different perspectives who are all interconnected before and after a strain of swine flu wipes out 99% of the world's population. It's a love letter to humanity, but it's also a story about survival, and a story about the power of belief and finding things to hold onto. And let me tell you: it was so, so good. For a book that jumps between timelines really often and without preamble, I found the pacing and the story arc of this novel to be perfect. It would shift into another perspective at just the right time, so that you were anticipating what would happen to the characters you were leaving, but it didn't leave you frustrated with a hundred cliffhangers and unsolved mysteries. This follows an overall sense of the book as being really... tasteful? If that makes sense?  The characters, the pacing, the writing style, the world building, it was all done in a beautifully intricate way that, though it is perhaps incredibly unlikely that so many interconnected people would have survived the flu, never felt campy and never broke my suspension of disbelief. Even references to Star Trek Voyager (a show I have a very soft spot for, but that's a story for another day) were done in a way that didn't feel self-indulgent or pandering, and fit perfectly with Kirsten as a character, and why she does the things that she does: "because survival is insufficient." The only thing that I would want to change about this story, is that I wish there were more. I want to know more about the Symphony and about the different civilizations that are cropping up in the post-apocalyptic landscape, I want to know more about Kirsten and August and Jeevan and especially about Station Eleven, the comic that lends the novel its name. I would take a long-running tv series of these people over the Walking Dead any day. And if that's all you have to complain about a book, then I think it's definitely done its job right.