One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of "King Lear." Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur's chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them. Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten's arm is a line from Star Trek: "Because …
One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of "King Lear." Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur's chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them. Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten's arm is a line from Star Trek: "Because survival is insufficient." But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.
In a future in which a pandemic has left few survivors, actress Kirsten Raymonde travels with a troupe performing Shakespeare and finds herself in a community run by a deranged prophet. The plot contains mild profanity and violence.
I enjoyed this! The story is told in cuts back and forth through time but I never got the feeling it was a gimmick. Mandel has a larger point to make. Larger, even, than the surface attraction of a post apocalyptic story.
Obviously reading this during the height of the Omicron variant is unsettling and I may have put up a few emotional blockers while getting through this however, the writing is beautiful and the plot is impressively woven.
A really enjoyable read. I am not into hardcore apocalypse porn, so I like how she glossed over a lot of terrible and potentially gory details. This isn't SciFi, it is a fictional account about people, the choices they make, and the consequences that they have to live with. It just happens to be set at the end of civilization.
Favorite book of 2014. Blew me away. I'll say more when I've had time to process it. I will say this-this is the first book to haunt me this year. Read it!
Edit: This is going to sound really...naive, perhaps, but one of the parts I enjoyed the most about this book was the glimpse of hope at the end. I enjoy reading dystopic novels, and can usually handle the dreariness and hopelessness, but this made for a nice change. This is a difficult one for me to explain why I liked it so much. Perhaps because it takes place in the Great Lakes region and I'm fascinated with what it would be like to experience something like this in my home state?
