Hi, everyone. I’m new to the sub. I’ve read the rules and tried to format everything as listed. If I need to fix anything up, lmk!
I purchased *Sea of Tranquility* on a whim from my local bookstore last year. I’d never even heard of Emily St. John Mandel or her works, and bought this book because the cover and the summary on the inside of the jacket drew me in. I did a test read of the first few chapters and wanted to read more, so I blew $25 with the sure feeling that I was buying a book I was going to like.
I was wrong.
I tried *very* hard to like this book, and for the first 35 or so pages that was Remittance (AKA Edwin St. Andrew’s point-of-view) I actually enjoyed myself, and then I spent the rest of the 225 pages wondering when I was going to like the story again. I’m going to very quickly go over what I didn’t like about Sea of Tranquility:
# 1. The Dialogue
**Oh my god, it’s bad.** Actually, that feels a bit mean-spirited and inaccurate. *Most* of the dialogue is inoffensive; it has hardly any *personality,* granted, but it’s fine. But when it IS bad, it’s *bad*. I have no idea how Emily St. John Mandel went from writing perfectly readable lines like:
*”I think I’ve had enough of this place \[…\] I thought I could make a go of it here, but if you’re going to leave England, surely there’s something to be said for actually leaving England.*” (p. 21)
And then in the very next section (~~which is supposed to take place in a year Mandel actually lived through~~) write dialogue like this:
*”I never told you this story? It’s epic. Her husband has a secret second family.” “Seriously? What a soap opera.”* (p. 41)
The dialogue from characters that live in the future is especially bad. Almost all of it is sluggish, cold, and lacking in any feeling or naturalness. None of the characters talk like people. I think the absolute worst example, which was so bad I actually stopped reading to message my friend like, *’wtf was this?’,* was the four-year-old daughter of Ephraim, who says:
*”If her parents loved her \[…\] it would have felt like the end of the world.”* (the context is that her and her father find a grave of another four-year-old girl)
**UGH!**
# 2. The Characters
This is actually mostly about Olive Llewellyn, who I hated. She contributes what feels like absolutely *nothing* to the plot, and naturally takes up a good quarter of the book’s limited pages. There’s one stylistic aspect I liked about the writing, and it’s that each point of view’s chapters are broken up in ways that reflect the character; it’s actually pretty excellent characterization. Olive is a fatigued, self-pitying writer, however, so this means her entire section gets *no* chapter breaks. Isolated, I enjoy how this can exhaust a reader, kinda putting you in Olive’s shoes in a way.
But Olive isn’t likable. She spends so much of her inner monologue feeling sorry for herself and she never develops past this point. And the book and its characters treat Olive like she’s SO IMPORTANT, so integral to the plot, that a main character gets into *quite* a lot of trouble for a decision he makes regarding Olive… and this leaves an especially bad taste in my mouth because Olive is basically Emily St. John Mandel’s self insert. Olive is a writer who has become well-known because of a book she wrote that heavily features a pandemic (**it sucks, by the way. They give you several excerpts from this fake book in the novel and it sucks**),>! and now she has to live through a pandemic. !<She is also married to a man and has a young daughter. Mandel is *also* a writer who has become well-known because of a book she wrote that heavily features a pandemic (*Station Eleven*), had to then live through COVID-19, and, when she wrote *Sea of Tranquility,* was married to a man and has a young daughter (she is apparently divorced now).
The fact that Olive is such a bore while also being a core plot point while *also* being the author’s very blatant self-insert character bogs down the story so much that I can’t even get into the other characters too much because I have spent so much time talking about why I hated Olive.
~~Gaspery was okay, Mirella was overly judgemental and kinda mean but at least sympathetic, Edwin was the only character I can say I liked in any way that matters. Moving on…~~
# 3. The Plot
I’ve been typing for way too long now, and I know this is already a lot to read for a Reddit post, so I will attempt to keep it brief ~~UNLIKE OLIVE WHO WANTS YOU TO KNOW HOW TIRED SHE IS EVERY THREE SENTENCES FOR LIKE 70 PAGES~~. I don’t think the plot’s concept was bad, obviously I thought it was a good concept or I wouldn’t have paid $25 to read it.
But it’s potential is squandered. >!It doesn’t even begin in earnest until page 102, out of 255 pages. It gives the novel almost no time to actually do anything, and by the time things actually got interesting for me, the book was over! And the foreshadowing is SO bad, you can tell exactly what is going to happen by page 45, which means you get to read roughly 60 more pages knowing where this is going, wondering when the hell it’s actually going to get going.!< The world-building is *so lazy* too. Everything about the futuristic world in *Sea of Tranquility* feels sluggish, and untethered.
>!The author thinks that cellphones won’t be called cellphones 200+ years in the future, but she doesn’t want to think up a name. So they’re called “devices” instead, which makes for insanely clunky and awkward dialogue. The author brings up in the very beginning the theme of colonialism and its horrors, but she doesn’t want to write a book about that, she wants to write a book ostensibly about how sad Olive Llewllyn is, so the colonization of the moon and space beyond isn’t explored in the slightest. She wants the Moon Colonies to feel dystopian but she doesn’t want the characters to see it as dystopian, but she doesn’t want to commit too much to either view and so it’s just one big SLOG to read through.!<
There’s a lot more I could say here, but if I said them we’d be here for an eternity when I’ve already been here forever, lol. It took me several days to write up this post. I guess there’s something to be said about a book that made me type this much, even if I came out thinking it wasn’t very good. But now I have to ask: have any of you read *Sea of Tranquility*? Did YOU like it? I really feel like I wasted money here, and I may donate it to a bookstore or something. But I want to hear your thoughts!
~~Next up on my list is The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I hope to god that I like that book more.~~
by StarCrossedRoad