I know that I am late to the Emily St. John Mandel game. After reading Station Eleven, I put a library hold on all of her other books. I think I was 40-something in the line for Sea of Tranquility, so I was pumped when I got the email that it was finally my turn!

The Story

A novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

My Thoughts.

I can absolutely see why Sea of Tranquility made Barak Obama’s summer reading list for 2022. I was already waiting for it when he released his list, but that just solidified that I needed to read it.

After reading three Mandel books now, I think the only thing I know is to expect the unexpected. There was SO MUCH that happened in this book that isn’t even touched on in the synopsis, but the book is still less than 300 pages. It moves so quickly. It’s like little micro-stories that gives you just enough to know what’s going on without getting bogged down in the specific color of green the grass is. It’s refreshing.

If you just read the synopsis, you might think this is partially some sort of historical fiction novel. False. I don’t even know how to best describe that genre or category this book would fit into. If you look on Goodreads, most readers have listed it just as “Fiction.”

One thing I thought was VERY cool was that there were characters and bits from The Glass Hotel in the book too. I’ve noticed that Mandel will weave her other stories into her books. You don’t miss out on anything if you haven’t read the other books, but they’re fun Easter eggs to find if you have read them.

I thoroughly enjoyed Sea of Tranquility. I think Station Eleven is still holding the first spot of Emily St. John Mandel books, but I will continue to read as many of her books books as I can.

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