#FromTheBookshelf Review – Station 11

Station 11

• Format Read  – Kindle
• How did I get this book  – I bought it (ages ago)
• Date Read –  January 28th – February 1st
• Genre – Science Fiction / Post Apoc. / Dystopia
• Publisher – Picador

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Synopsis

Set in the days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the cross hairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

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My thoughts

We open, with a confession;

Station 11 is one of those books that everyone was telling me I needed to read. So I didn’t……. not that I’m stubborn or anything.

Recently however I’ve been looking at all the unread books on my selves and on my Kindle and thinking I needed to start making a dent in them. I had heard there was a “sort of sequel” to Station 11 (EDIT 24/02 – Author confirmed in a tweet to me that it is not a sequel, but some of the same characters are in the new book) coming so I opened it up. I didn’t know much about the book, only that it was set after the fall of society. I read the first couple of chapters and was hooked. Then I turn to check twitter…. then the news;

So yeah… not a great time to start. Even the author said so;

To all the distressed readers in my mentions: we’re in agreement that it just wasn’t a great week to start reading Station Eleven, and I don’t like to think about the coronavirus either.

— Emily St. J. Mandel (@EmilyMandel) January 26, 2020

Anyway, despite the immense amount of fear it caused me, I continued.

As you may have figured out this is a book about humanities downfall – a topic I love to read about. It is caused by a flu like virus (sound familiar?) that kills pretty much everyone who catches it in a few days. As you can imagine, it doesn’t take long for society to fall.

This is a brilliantly written work that is paced to perfection. Differing protagonists and timelines lead to the important information being drip fed making this quite a page turner. I couldn’t wait to see where it would turn and how all the stories would come to a resolution.

The characters themselves are incredibly interesting, and I must admit that I was most intrigued by the history of The Prophet. The Traveling Symphony are too an interesting bunch, but not as interesting as some of the other survivors which dot the wasteland.

So, in conclusion. All those people who told me I HAD to read this book. You were right….. this time

If you haven’t read it and this kind of book is your thing, I urge you to give it a go. Don’t be like me…. although maybe wait for this whole corona virus situation to calm down a bit.

5 Big Glowing Stars.

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