Station Eleven...Worst Book Ever?

Pat Piscatelli Emily St. John Mandel’s new book, Station Eleven, follows a group of Shakespearean actors after the collapse of the world due to a disease. Yes, Mandel somehow sees the importance of Shakespeare and acting in a world of anarchy and demise. Mandel also writes about the world before the epidemic. Mandel bounces from past to present and then back to past throughout the book, often confusing the reader. Mandel, however, does a decent job of tying all the events past and present together in the end, but you still need to suffer through over three hundred pages of pointless paragraphs, and confusing stories to get there. The rewarding end does not compare to the horrendous beginning and middle of the book. Mandel’s book, Station Eleven, follows a group of Shakespearean actors and musicians, called the traveling symphony, in a post epidemic world. The group travels into a town and finds a christian prophet. The prophet believes that the symphony kidnapped one of his wives, so he decides to kidnap two members of the symphony. Looks like the post pandemic world did not affect the sanity of people; because of course a group of young actors and musicians you’ve never seen before clearly kidnapped your wife. After the kidnapping of the symphony members, and the alleged kidnapping of the prophet's wife conflicts start to arise between the group and the prophet. The fight between the groups continues until the dramatic ending. The book lacks in structure. The plot is confusing enough, but add in the past and present aspect and this book becomes like a teenagers room, a mess. Mandel starts the book with a man, Arthur, dying in a play, and that's where the book should have stopped. After the death of Arthur, Mandel jumps between characters and the time period so often you forget what was just written. “Ten minutes before the photograph, Arthur Leander and the girl are waiting by the coat check in a restaurant in Toronto. This is well before the Georgia Flu. Civilization won’t collapse for another fourteen years. Arthur has been filming a period drama all week, partly on a soundstage and partly in a park on the edge of the city” (Mandel 71). If the structure of the book flowed better chronologically maybe the novel could be decent. In addition to having terrible structure, Mandel also struggled in her writing techniques. She switches from passive voice to active voice randomly. This not only is strange but it also is confusing. Mandel struggled with diction in the book. "Clark woke at four a.m. the next morning and took a taxi to the airport" (Mandel 223). Instead of took Mandel should have wrote rode. Some books like, Lone Survivor, Unbroken, and Sherlock Holmes you can’t put down, but Station Eleven is hard to pick up. After ten pages the book has already bored you, and confused you enough to drive back to the bookstore and ask for your money back. Unless you are required to read it for school I cannot understand why anyone would read this book.