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Feb 28, 2018RebelBelle13 rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
I didn't believe I would like this book very much. I'm not into dystopian, end-of-the-world, post-apocalyptic books. But this. This was done so beautifully. I loved how it was written, choosing one point in time- the death of Arthur Leander, as the moment that the world ended. St. John Mandel took that moment and spiraled outward, both forward and backward in time, years before the Georgia flu ended the world, and twenty years after. The blurb on the back is a little misleading; it claims it's about a traveling symphony and a prophet. It is, but it's so much more than that. It's really about five or six people who were close with the actor who passed away- their lives before and after the virus that killed 99% of the world's population. Mandel weaves the stories so seamlessly that we don't know that the characters are going to collide with each other until a few pages before, because we're so wrapped up in their individual struggles and survival. Mandel is frank with us about her story and the cost of the flu that rampaged across the world. Kirsten finds skeletons in their cars. In their beds. On the side of the road. Mandel shares the fates of random characters with us. A stagehand dies of exposure on the road to Quebec a week after Leander dies. Two little girls die two days later at home in bed. An entire airplane full of sick people lands and stays closed for twenty years. This seems harsh, but the end of the world as we know it would be tragic, and terrible, and horribly sad. It is made clear that some people are immune to the virus, and others survived because they were hidden away and prepared. In the end, this novel is more of a feeling, or an impression. The second half of the book was constantly giving me goosebumps. Mandel keeps using words like impossibly, irrevocably, inescapable, inevitable, and others that completely set the tone of the novel. It conveys despair and the end of something, but possibly also a beginning of something else. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who specifically likes post-apocalypse novels, because this is more character driven than world-building, but here, it really works. Because, as Kirsten noted, "Survival is insufficient."