Station Eleven book review

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Published by Knopf on September 9, 2014
Pages: 336
Goodreads

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 crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

Station Eleven was a book that confused me from the offset, I am still not sure what the point of the story was. I struggled to understand why we needed all of the information we got, the most interesting parts for me seemed to be the least important which was a little annoying. I kinda felt like I spent the book waiting to get back to those bits which meant I wasn’t fully invested in the other parts. Overall, I enjoyed this book, but I don’t quite get how everything meshed together and I felt like there was a lot attempted that didn’t necessarily come together by the end.

We follow our main character Kirsten as she travels with a Symphony around what is left of the USA. I think the actual symphony was such an interesting concept and I felt like if that had been the focus and we learnt more about this group of people and what their life was like before the flu I would have loved this book way more. I thought that the characters were underdeveloped and I really didn’t connect with Kirsten, you just didn’t learn enough about them all to understand why they were the way they were and why you should root for them. I just wished there had been more about them and why they were there rather than focusing on what seemed like a redundant story about an actor who died before the pandemic.

The best bit of Station Eleven for me would have to be reading about the Georgia Flu and seeing how the world copes with the pandemic. I will say I’m not sure that this was the best book to read right now. But it was a really interesting book in the sense that I loved the hope that the characters have and the focus that there might be more to life than just surviving. I was also really interested in how the world had been shaped by the crisis following everything. I think it was really eye-opening to see how the world crumbled once the communications went down, it brought to light how dependent we are on the internet and our phones.

I think the worst bits of Station Eleven for me would have to be the constant back and forth with characters that had no real point within the story. I found myself bored and a lot of the time waiting for it to be over. I still don’t know what this book was trying to achieve with all the different stories but I felt like because there were so many there wasn’t enough time or plot to join them all together in a nice succinct package and what we were left with was a jumble. Everything towards the end was rushed and had no real direction, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be feeling and I didn’t know what I was supposed to be rooting for. The whole experience left me a little confused and frustrated. I just felt like the focus of this book was in the wrong place and it was just a little lacklustre when it came down to the main part of the book.

I don’t know whether I would recommend Station Eleven. I managed to read all of it and I can appreciate some of the imagery and the way the world was constructed but I definitely think there are better books out there than this. I think I might give her new book a go when it comes out and see if I enjoy that one any better.

This feels like a very unpopular opinion at the moment. What are some books that you really didn’t connect with but the rest of the world seems to be raving about!