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oblue

Abandoned by Booklikes

Government drone by day and book lover and geek girl by night!

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This Time Next Year
Sophie Cousens
An Extraordinary Union
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A Princess in Theory: Reluctant Royals
Alyssa Cole
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Victor LaValle
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Station Eleven

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel I hate it when a book is pushed at me as being the best thing since sliced bread, and then I read it and wonder if the people who see it that way have ever read a book before. Seriously. This book is like The Girl on the Train all over again for me. I start to wonder am I insane and not seeing what everyone else on Earth apparently is seeing. And then I question my taste level. This time though I was happy to see I was not alone in wondering what the heck was this book supposed to be. I noticed if BrokenTune doesn't care for a contemporary book, chances are I won't either. I have to remember that.

I would break down the plot for you, but this book doesn't have one. Seriously. This book starts off with before the end of the old world (cue dramatic music) and we have a man named Jeevan who is sitting in an audience watching the play King Lear. The man playing King Lear, Arthur Leander suddenly collapses. Jeevan who is an EMT (by way of once upon a time being a papparazzi) leaps to the stage and does his best, but realizes that Arthur is not going to survive. That event and man (Arthur Leander) loosely ties together all of the other threads in this book. We are hammered over the head though that this night marked the end of the world as we know it. Why you ask? Because a super special flu is transported over from Moscow and it can kill a person within a day or two of being exposed to it. Jeevan is clumsily given this information by a supposed close friend who is a doctor. So we move from a sudden death on stage to Jeevan realizing that the whole world may soon die.

If you were at all interested in what befalls Jeevan you have to wait a while for the story to circle back to him. Instead we are thrust forward 20 years and we are re-introduced to a character we met as a young girl named Kristen. Now Kristen is traveling with a group called The Traveling Symphony. Do you want to know more about this group? Well too bad. We get muddled details about how this group was formed and no real sense of people because the author chooses to call them by their instrument and what position they are playing. I think at one point my eyes just glazed over. As someone who just finished 10 plays by William Shakespeare I know that I should be moved by the fact that this little group travels back and forth and performs plays and music for now what remains as towns. Instead I couldn't stop thinking how stupid they were. I am an active The Walking Dead fan/watcher and all I could think was well have fun fighting off the ferals you meet walking around.

Seriously. As readers we are not provided much details beyond bad flu kills off entire world almost and we are then expected to follow this random group. Have I mentioned how dumb they are? Because after they ignored a warning about a town they have traveled to before, I was over them.

Other characters that randomly appear here and there are Clark (one of Arthur's best friends), Elizabeth (Arthur's first wife), and of course Arthur.

I don't even know what to say besides the fact there was not a lot of depth given to any of these characters because the author kept going back and forth to "present day" events and past events.

The writing was not good in my opinion at all. There was so much repetition that it was maddening after a while. Also Ms. Mandel kept changing up narrative styles, we go from third person, to an interview format, and then she threw in a letter format as well. It was too much and none of it hung together very well.

The flow was awful. I think this book could have been much better if we had either stayed with Jeevan for the whole book (and honestly was the only character I was interested in) or even Kristen. Going back and forth and focusing so much on Elizabeth was a snooze. I don't know what her deal was exactly, but she was tiresome. Having all of these characters connected to Arthur Leander was not a good way to go about tying each and other thing together. I was also a bit baffled that the character of Kristen was so obsessed with him since she met him when she was 8, and we know as readers other horrible stuff has come her way.

The setting of Station Eleven would have been interesting if the author dwelled on just one town/settlement. I honestly still don't get how people just forgot how electricity works, or wouldn't get savvy on items that can be used for medical purposes. Are we seriously saying books don't exist? And there are random asides at one points that pilots took off in small planes and disappeared and my thought process was, what? This makes no sense. Are we just saying that these people died? Or just flew off and settled elsewhere?

The ending I think was supposed to be about hope, but I yawned through it. Seriously, if you are tempted to see what all the fuss is about, I would say don't. Spend your money on another book. Or at least get this one from the library.