my review of Sea of Tranquility in CHIRB!
Just a quick little link — I reviewed Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Sea of Tranquility, for the Chicago Review of Books. I liked a lot of it, and it bears some resemblance to her amazing Station Eleven, but it’s also:
far more focused. Station Eleven dipped into multiple characters’ points of view, following both the pandemic’s outbreak and the recovering world several decades on, and Mandel’s writing fully inhabited every character, immersing us in their particular angle on the stricken world. Sea of Tranquility keeps the multifaceted narration style, passing with ease between voices, but narrows the focus to a simpler question: What happened?