Summer Reading Project, BookLikes Satellite

The events of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven drift back and forth in time, some times to years before the Georgian Flu wiped out almost everyone to years later. A handful of narrators tell their stories, linked to each other through an actor who died the day before the flu arrived. They meet and part, sometimes discovering their link to each other, sometimes not. As this contemplative novel spins along, characters mediate on what they've lost, but Station Eleven isn't a depressing novel. One character has a phrase from a Star Trek episode tattooed on her arm: Survival is insufficient. This is the other link between the characters, before and after the flu. The characters before the flu are just going through the motions; one describes it as sleepwalking through life. The characters after the flu travel and perform Shakespeare's plays and music to bring something more into the lives of the people who are just surviving...

Read the rest of my review at Summer Reading Project.