Book Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven is a few years old, but it is the book I have talked about and thought about the most this past year.  It may hit a little bit close to home, but the story begins with an extremely fast-moving virus that kills a huge portion of the global population within days of being detected. It follows several different characters with flashbacks to during and immediately after the virus hits, tracking how they survive (or don’t) and what happens in the world as things slowly go offline. In the present, 20 years after the pandemic, the main character is Kirsten Raymonde, who is part of a group of actors and musicians known as the Travelling Symphony that visits different settlements and towns throughout the Midwest. The group travels to a village with very fundamentalist religious values, which begins the core of the conflict in the book. Many of the stories from the beginning are woven together as the survivors cross paths. You see a grim but hopeful picture of how the world has changed and also the importance of art, friendship and ritual. I was fascinated by some of the details, like cars not working because auto gas goes bad after two years, a “museum” of items that no longer work, and determined that if the world ever ended, I would hoard sneakers and contact lenses. 

Good For:

Apocalypse preppers (which I think is pretty much all of us right now), people who enjoy epic journeys and diving into really strong character descriptions. When disaster is striking, and the story is following several different people in different circumstances, the author paints these incredible almost short stories to show how the situation is unfolding. It’s an incredibly sad and vivid book, but it reminds me that our current circumstances aren’t quite as scary as they can feel. 

Related Classic Read:

At times this book reminded me of The Lord of the Rings - a group of people, some on a journey, trying to navigate a dangerous and unpredictable world, but maintaining the relationships that bind them together and bind them to their humanity. There is good and evil, selfishness and selflessness and a lot of gray areas that really cause you to examine what you would do in the same circumstances.