Eric Wagoner 📚 reviewed Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Touching and Hopeful
4 stars
An easy read, and the crossovers with her other books were interesting. I enjoyed this one quite a bit.

Emily St. John Mandel: Sea of Tranquility (Paperback, 2023, HarperCollins Publishers)
Paperback, 320 pages
Published Sept. 15, 2023 by HarperCollins Publishers.
An easy read, and the crossovers with her other books were interesting. I enjoyed this one quite a bit.
I liked the intertwined storylines and i thought the characters were well drawn and sympathetic. The only problem I had was the idea of the continuation of culture over hundreds of years. it rang false to me.
I found this touching and hopeful, I liked how poignantly the characters were drawn, and the themes of kindness and the vicissitudes of life.
My main complaint was that I think the simulation theory stuff was basically an unnecessary macguffin and didn't add to the themes (at least as far as they interested me).
A breezy, fun(ish, given some of the subject matter) read. The resolution of the book hinges, somewhat, on a twist that is revealed near the end, and I must confess that I was finding the book far more satisfying up to the point that the twist was revealed. It just felt a bit too “plotty” to me in a book that otherwise revels in nice details.
Fantastic to a point I did not expect. Very meta, and covers aspects that took me by surprise. I rarely read the descriptions of books written by authors that I have read before, and here it totally paid off. If you have read the previous two works by this author, you will like where this book takes you.