ReView: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

"If you say the name of the thing you fear, might you attract that thing's attention?"

In Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility, we join a series of endearing and wonderful characters on a gorgeous, delicate time-traveling journey which tackles life, love, loneliness and trying to understand our place in this world.

The novel is told in sections focusing on different characters, first beginning with Edwin St. Andrew in 1912, a new immigrant to Canada. His experience feeling lonely and isolated echoes through the other sections of the book where we meet new characters who are each as interesting and complex as the next. Through these sections, we move forward (and sometimes backwards) in time to truly discover how we are each connected and that "ripple effect" our actions can have, despite the isolated-ness we feel.

I have to be honest, what held me back from reading this story was the time-traveling aspect, which I find is often hard to make human and real. But the tenderness with which the author handles such a (normally) dramatic, wild idea made me rethink the possibility of the idea all together. Along with the inclusion of an all-too-real pandemic, she manages to take sci-fi elements which we've seen before and make them uncannily relevant and real. 

The book reminded me of a perfectly composed orchestra piece, mixing beautiful long stanzas with punctuations of short staccato sections, all expertly done.

Sea of Tranquility reminded me of why I don't do starred reviews anymore. It's hard to put into words how much I loved this book. I had to sit this book down after reading it just to take in what I just experienced. I say experienced vs. read because the best books are ones you experience yourself vs. read.