Book Review: Sea Of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

March 18, 2024

I am not really sure what to say about this book. I am not really sure if I even really liked it. I read this book with a couple of friends for a bookclub and it was picked by my friend Audrey. She, and I, had heard a lot of good things about the book and the way that it was thought provoking, and I agree, it was quite thought provoking, but not in the ways I like a book to be.

This story follows a few little blips in time, and a name named Gaspery that is commissioned to look into what all of these blips in time and see what they have in common and see if he can learn as to why they happened. He travels back to 1912, 1918, 1990, 2008, 2020 and 2203 while he is currently living in 2401. Emily St. John Mandel does a great job of not saying anything too terribly disruptive, so the reader can imagine how they see the future looking, and how they can imagine life looking like on the moon and how it would feel to be caught in the middle of another pandemic.

For most of the book I felt a little like I was confused as to why these moments were connected and why we were following this person around time, but there was a little twist in the end that I did not see coming. If you have read any of my reviews before, you know that I am rather proud of the fact that I often figure out the twist early in the book, but much prefer it when I am bamboozled. I feel there is no reason I should be able to figure out the twist right in the beginning if it is a good book ( one of the many reasons I hated Verity by Colleen Hoover, but this is not about that )

I did want to share a quote from the book, though, that I really loved:

“I had a fascinating conversation with my mother once, where she talked about the guilt she and her friends had about bringing children into the universe… - and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we are living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we are uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst it has ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

And this feels both like we are not as pivotal and important as we think we are and also we are just as pivotal and important as we think we are. The things that are happening now are making a difference to the world around us and the overall timeline, but not so much of a difference that everything rests on our shoulders. We are not the only group of people who have ever felt this way, but we are also the only group of people who will ever experience the life that we have experienced. While similar things have happened in the past and will happen in the future, they will be different in ways that we cannot imagine, because we are here now and this is the life we are living.

Anyway, this book questions the reality of life and the real meaningfulness of what we do and what is happening around us, and that is really not something that I love to think about, so it was a bit of a hard read for me. Again, I am not sure I even really liked the book, and I am not sure I would suggest it.