Station Eleven

According to Emily St. John Mandel's website, Karen Valby in Entertainment Weekly said, Station Eleven is "A novel that miraculously reads like equal parts page-turner and poem. One of her great feats is that the story feels spun..."

I love that. Mandel's story is spun so beautifully--it's like a carpet of a book! An expensive Iranian carpet that might just be 100 years old but could be brand new and you really don't know which is true. There's something so magical about this book. Maybe it's the intricacy of the characters and timeline, where past melds with present for the reader so the two seem linked in a way I may never have felt before reading a book. Considering how strangely bleak the post-apocalyptic world in the future (or is it present?) is, it's amazing how strongly connected we feel to it as well as to the characters' previous lives.

The use of present tense must be partially what bridges the past and future, as it makes the various time frames feel equally poignant and devastating. The character development is more evocative than most science fiction I've read--although I must admit that's not terribly much. The Road by McCarthy might be the most similar book to this I've ever read although I don't know if it's really all that similar at all.

FIVE stars. Really. It's that good. 2014 was the most awesome year for books. Now I have to go read the book that actually won the National Book Award last year (Station Eleven and All the Light were finalists). My expectations are now soaring in the heavens.