272 pages
English language
Published Feb. 11, 2022 by Knopf Incorporated, Alfred A., Vintage.
I really liked it, but I could definitely have used a "CW: pandemic" because these parts were pretty uncomfortable to read for me, and I felt kind of blindsided.
Nice short book. Nothing groundbreaking but adequately conveyed it's purpose.
I'm conflicted about Sea of Tranquility, the beginning is very promising but once the sci-fi elements start to emerge, things go down hill for an experienced sci-fi reader.
The sci-fi in, Sea of Tranquility, is just a thin veneer, a paper thin scaffolding for a story about people struggling to find tranquility in a harsh and unforgiving universe.
The time travel element was fun, but the portions of the story located hundreds of years in the future and in space, feel almost entirely contemporary and may as well have been set in 2030 at different locations on earth.
I was expecting a genre novel that will appeal to a wide audience beyond sci-fi readers. I got sci-fi so shallow it's embarrassing.
All that said, I enjoyed the characters, cared about their struggles, triumphs and defeats. This is a good literary work of fiction.
a little overrated
Each character this book follows has a captivating story that feels simultaneously real and relatable. The portion of the story spent in a pandemic and the conclusion made me feel seen during these times when we can feel isolated and left me hopeful and re-centered on things that matter most.
I liked it because it was well written and short. Longer would have been boring, shorter would have cut too much. I wonder how the author's experience during the pandemic influenced the Last Book Tour Before the End of the World chapter (at least one discussion in the book was real—but from 2015). I liked this book very much, but I liked Station Eleven better, hence the 4 stars.
This book washed over me. I loved the story and the way it made me feel about family, about time. The way the different stories knit together, the moments of realization that the author flawlessly sets up and executes... all of it. Lovely.
This book couldn’t have been written before 2020, and that fascinates me.
Took me so time to get into but then I tore thru.
Funny how the publisher of "Sea of Tranquility" goes out of their way to describe this book as anything but science fiction, which it absolutely is.
Actually, scratch that: it's not funny. It's infuriating, and it's a disservice not only to the author and to her readers but to science fiction writers who have written books with more interesting characters (and premises) than this book but who cannot be afforded the same marketing credentials as Emily St. John Mandel because she writes "literary fiction" (which, ahem, she does not, by her own admission).
Guess I shouldn't expect any better from the dried up bones of what is left of Knopf, another name in publishing that is a mere shadow of what it used to be.
Barf.
I enjoyed this book. As with most time travel stories, there's an inconsistency that doesn't quite make sense. But that doesn't matter.
In this short novel, the characters are good and the interweaving of the story at different times in history is done well.
Some lovely observations about life and pandemics. I loved how it wove in elements of The Glass Hotel. I've seen this compared to Cloud Atlas, but this actually makes sense!
"I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all the millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world."
I don't normally use long quotes like that, but it felt especially poignant today, now, this year. Things are bad, but they will always be bad, have always been bad, in different but similar ways.
This was an incredibly enjoyable time travel book. I won't summarize the plot since I think a lot of the joy is figuring this one out for yourself, but in general, a future man tries to stop a future thing from happening.
It's got a bit …
"I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all the millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world."
I don't normally use long quotes like that, but it felt especially poignant today, now, this year. Things are bad, but they will always be bad, have always been bad, in different but similar ways.
This was an incredibly enjoyable time travel book. I won't summarize the plot since I think a lot of the joy is figuring this one out for yourself, but in general, a future man tries to stop a future thing from happening.
It's got a bit of a slow start where you wonder where things are going, but once things pick up, they really pick up. It's a short book (comparatively speaking) anyway, so when things start moving rapidly, it's incredibly satisfying coming to realizations and seeing where things are going. I especially loved all the references to Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, and I think there was some fourth wall breaking at one point which was funny to me.
An easy add to my favorites this year. If you liked her previous books, definitely pick this up.
Content warning Contains slight spoilers after 1st paragraph
Emily St. John Mandel is such an incredibly talented author and this book is richly written. The characters are intriguing and the plot will kind of blow your mind, put it back together, and then blow it again.
When Emily St. John Mandel wrote her first book about pandemics (Station Eleven), very few of us had ever lived through one. Now, we all have the experience of COVID lockdowns, being confined to career/education-by-Zoom, not seeing another human in person for weeks on end, not hugging family members for months on end...this book is highly informed by those experiences, and this author is the exact write person to write us through that shared experience (even if this pandemic is set a few hundred years in the future).
I am an Emily St. John Mandel fanboi for life.
That was a fun book. The book doesn't answer any questions and that's okay.
It's meta in at least a few ways: three pandemics are referenced, including COVID, and there's an author reflecting on having written about a pandemic while living through one (and Emily St. John Mandel wrote Station Eleven).
A pandemic novel, a time travel novel, and a central character who is a beleaguered author who can't decide if they are writing a novel or a novella... phew, honestly the writing was pretty good for me to give it 3 stars.
