SEA OF TRANQUILITY - Emily St. John Mandel


 I'd been hearing a bit of buzz about this book and so I was quite looking forward to it.

1912, Vancouver Island. Eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew has crossed the Atlantic by steamship. He enters the Canadian wilderness, open to exploring and taking in what he might see when he hears the haunting sounds of a violin echoing in an airship terminal.  Something that definitely should not be.

Some two hundred years later, writer Olive Llewellyn of the second moon colony is on a book tour on Earth. Her novel, a bestseller about a pandemic, contains a strange passage about a man in an airship terminal, playing his violin for spare change when a forest grows up around him.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a detective, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, is hired to investigate something strange happening in the North American wilderness. What he finds is something that can't possibly be true, a blending of time that could seriously damage the timeline as we know it.

When I write that I had been hearing some buzz about this book, I should note that what I was hearing was the title of the book, the author's name, and anticipation for this book to be released.  I was not hearing what it was about.  Though had I known it was about time and/or time travel, I probably would still have been interested in reading this. But I definitely felt a bit let down once I was finished.

Getting involved in a sweeping epic (and a book like this which covers covers hundreds of years and multiple generations surely must qualify as an epic) is a daunting task in the best of circumstances but making this a time-travel epic is gutsy. While there are a few good time-travel books out there, it's a subject which, if you don't control it well, will get out of hand, become confusing, and/or create more questions than answers.

Author Emily St. John Mandel's writing is very poetic and lyrical and in many cases, it would really enhance a book.  But in this case it often feels like it's fighting against the story - being poetic in language but not in theme.

I seem to be a bit of an anomaly in this thinking.  There are a lot of review and it's rated over 4.0 on Goodreads, but this does not make my recommendation list, but garners an 'eh'.

Looking for a good book?  Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel was a much-anticipated book and there are many who find great charms within, but this reviewer doesn't place it very high on the recommendation list.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

3 stars

* * * * * *

Sea of Tranquility

author: Emily St. John Mandel

publisher: Knopf

ISBN: 9780593321447

hardcover, 255 pages

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