Book: Sea of Tranquility
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Pages: 272
This is my 25th read for the year
++This book fitting this category is a bit of a stretch, but it does take place a bit on a ship and an airship, so I went with it.
This is a story that spans hundreds of years. It starts with a young man who has been exiled by his family for bad behavior and is forced to take a steamship to Canada. While there he has a strange encounter on a beach. He hears a violin and a sound he cannot place - a whooshing - which leaves him realing.
Two centuries later a novelist named Olive is on her book tour on Earth, but her home is a colony on the moon. While traveling there are signs that a pandemic is starting and she has to make a choice whether to stay on Earth or go home to her family.
Two centuries even further on a man named Gaspery leaves a menial job to become an investigator at the Time Institute. His job is to figure out an anomly that appeared in the North American wilderness in the past. However - in his travels to get there, he upends the lives of the people he was just to observe and is soon exiled himself. He weaves the three timelines together but what will that do to the future when he decides to intervene?
This was a fair book. I have read The Glass Castle and Station Eleven by this author, and when I saw she had a new science fiction novel coming out, I wanted to check it out. It is quite short, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, until you get to the end. It felt unfinished. I would have liked to know more. The writing is up to the author's usual standards, but the story for me fell a little flat. I wanted more! Another 50 pages to wrap it up a little tighter would have been the ticket.
Stars: 3 1/2
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