Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
5 stars
After being moderately disappointed in The Glass Hotel, I am thrilled to report that I loved this book! This book is weird and the characters are interesting, which is exactly what I wanted after reading and loving Station Eleven. The story weaves together several timelines across multiple centuries, all connected by a mysterious rift in time. In 1912, Edwin St. Andrews travels from England to Vancouver Island to make his way in the world and finds himself in the woods, suddenly disoriented by a whooshing sound and a distant violin playing. When a strange man, claiming to be a priest, shows up asking questions about his unique experience and then disappears when questioned, Edwin is left with only his strange memory. Hundreds of years later, best-selling author Olive Llewellyn visits earth from her moon colony home to promote her newest novel, which features a pivotal scene where a violinist plays in an airship terminal while ancient forests rise around him briefly. Even further into the future, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is hired to investigate the strange anomaly on earth and uncover the reason for the rift in the timeline and whether or not their world is even real. If you love books with multiple interconnecting timelines (think Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr), this would be a fun read for you!
11/22/63 by Stephen King
4 stars
I went from never having read a Stephen King novel to reading two in two months! Much like Billy Summers, this wasn't my favorite book of the month, but it was still a good time. Jake Epping's life is fairly boring: He teaches high school English during the day, teaches adults in the evenings, recently got divorced, and frequents a local diner with shockingly cheap food. One day, the owner of the diner, Al, shows him a portal that leads to 1958. No matter how long one stays in the past, Al tells him, only two minutes will pass in the present. That's how Al keeps prices so cheap: he's buying food at 1958 prices. But buying cheap meat isn't the only thing Al's been doing in the past. He's spent years trying to determine who really killed JFK so that he can stop it from happening. Al, however, has terminal cancer and knows he won't be able to return to 1958, live the necessary five years, and stop the assassination, so he challenges Jake to take up the mantle. Jake hesitantly agrees and is launched on a journey through the past that will lead him into dangerous situations and to the love of his life. Overall, I enjoyed the concept of this book (if you liked the show Dark and what it does with time travel, I think you would too). The book loses a point, however, because there's just no good reason for it to be 849 pages long and I think it could have been stronger with some trimming. Plus, there's some violence toward women that was hard for me to get through.
Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang
4.5 stars
This was one of the books I impulsively put on hold last month without much foreknowledge and I was very pleasantly surprised! Named for a tragic heroine doomed to repeated heartbreak, Daiyu lives her childhood in defiance of her potential fate tied to her namesake. When her parents suddenly disappear and her grandmother pushes her away and into hiding as a boy in a faraway city, her outlook looks grim. Things go from bad to worse when she is abducted and smuggled across the ocean from her home in China to America and forced into a brothel in San Francisco. Through an alliance with an unlikely friend at the brothel, Daiyu escapes and believes her life is on a new trajectory back toward her home. The curse of her name follows her, however, and she decides to live her life in hiding as a man to protect herself from further exploitation and do everything in her power to return home. When she sees the abuse inflicted on her fellow Chinese immigrants, however, she must decide whether to focus on her own escape or work to better the lives of those around her. Because of the subject matter, this book is not an easy one to get through, but it's well worth the time. If you enjoyed books like Wild Swans by Jung Chang or The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee, this could make for an excellent, beautifully written, and tragically fascinating book flight pick.
Beartown by Fredrik Backman
4.5 stars
While quite different from his other books (including my favorite thus far, Anxious People), this novel drew me in and I flew through it over Memorial Day weekend. Beartown is a place that's at the bottom of the pecking order and long forgotten. At the beginning of the book, however, the community is on the brink of hope as their junior hockey team prepares for the semi-finals. This year, they have a chance to bring renown back to their community thanks to the scrappy and often boisterous and misbehaved group of teenage boys. When a violent crime is committed on the eve of their big match and the victim decides to come forward with her story, potentially ruining the team's chances, the town begins to implode. The community members begin to turn on each other, leveling accusations that have the power to destroy the town. While the teenagers may have caused the turmoil, it's the adults who threaten to destroy each other and their children with their secrets and allegations. It's a much darker book than I anticipated, but not one without hope or without characters who act courageously. If you enjoy a book with complicated characters and communities or books about how secrets can fester and twist reality, this would be a great pick for you. Plus, Backman is such a phenomenal writer that I'll read anything he writes.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
4 stars
Another month, another Pulitzer Prize winner crossed off my TBR! Told through intersecting stories, the book follows the lives of an aging punk rock star, Bennie Salazar, and a troubled record executive, Sasha, in his employ. Though Bennie and Sasha don't know much about each other's pasts, the reader sees each of them at pivotal points in their lives and comes to understand why they are the way they are. Sasha's story traces from her troubled childhood to her cleptomaniac early adulthood, to her lost wanderings around Naples, to her deep care for her own troubled friends. Bennie's journey stretches from the height of his fame in the punk rock scene to his divorce and struggles to connect with his son, to his tumultuous relationship with his mentor. The stories are not linear but organized instead to reveal themes in each of the characters' lives and the lives of those around them. It felt more like reading a series of vignettes than a straightforward novel. I found myself losing track of the narrative off and on throughout this book, which is where it lost a point for me, but Egan's writing was so strong that I still enjoyed it. It's definitely one I'm interested in rereading to get the full effect.
