Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

Genre: Fiction, Dystopia, Sci-fi

Bug Rating: 2/5

Overall: This one was a buddy read pick, and we thought it was kind of the perfect time to read about a pandemic!

I thought Station Eleven was going to be an action packed story focusing on how/why this flu pandemic was spreading, the attempts to contain it and the collapse of the world, but it wasn’t.

It centred around the story of human resilience. Which I could have got on board with, had the book not been so drawn out and very slow. I also didn’t connect with any of the characters and to be honest, I nearly DNF’d it.

Curious to hear from others who have read Station Eleven – what did you think?

Plot:

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.