GOOD READS
Submitted by Kristen Johnson
A band of travelling musicians and thespians treks across North America, performing symphonies and Shakespeare to small groups of people. Civilization has collapsed after a swift Georgian flu, and the survivors are few. The worst of the collapse occurred twenty years prior, so the reader isn’t privy to the details, leaving us, rather than the characters to ask the big questions. What would our world look like without electricity, fuel, law enforcement, governing bodies? How would we feed and protect ourselves? What objects would we find valuable? Mandel has written a beautiful, thoughtful and subtle post- apocalyptic novel. Her characters are engaging and realistic, clearly rooted in our time, yet forced to live in a world uniquely different from our own. She presents a dystopian world, but this is not a dystopian novel. In this wonderfully balanced narrative, Mandel manages to give the reader hope without being saccharine.
STATION ELEVEN
Station Eleven is listed as science fiction, but it is a kinder post- apocalyptic work than its contemporaries. Readers of literary fiction would also find it enjoyable.
Author: Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf, 2014) Winner of Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel (2015)
Kristen Johnson is a homesteader and home-school mom who lives in Eastern PEI. She loves to spend her free time between the pages of a book.
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www.pei-living.ca FALL 2018
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