Station Eleven

By: Emily St.John Mandel
Location: FIC MAN
Genre: Dystopia- Post apocalyptic

A wonderful story about the resilience of people.

The novel opens with a famous actor having a heart attack and dying on stage while playing King Lear. That same night, there is a massive outbreak of a deadly virus called the Georgia Flu, and within weeks, 99 percent of the world's population is wiped out. What will happen to the survivors? What kind of civilization is left?

 Emily St. John Mandel's novel is about a traveling Shakespearean theater troupe and symphony roaming a doomsday North America 20 years after a flu pandemic has killed 99.9% of the world's population -- Here are reasons you should read it, too, and some things you might learn.

1. It'll make you marvel at the world as we know it. In the world of Station Eleven, planes no longer fly, cars no longer drive. Humans no longer have running water, electricity, the Internet. The characters' longing for the sound of electric guitars, cool air blowing from a vent, and the miracle of flight will remind you of how amazing the world we live in truly is.

2. You'll be happy you aren't invited to Hollywood dinner parties. 

3. It shows losing everything can be a blessing. Jeevan, a character who in the pre-pandemic world works to leave behind his unfulfilling job as a paparazzi, finds in the doomsday world a chance to do valuable work.

4. It'll remind you the people who drive you the most crazy are perhaps also the ones you don't want to live without.  When three members of The Traveling Symphony disappear without a trace, the others realize just how much they mean to each other.

5. Making art for art's sake is a worthy endeavor.

6. There's no telling what art will survive the apocalypse. 

7. Who wouldn't want to read about a post-apocalyptic traveling Shakespearean theater company and symphony armed with knives? It's pleasing to think that even if only a few humans survive, so will Shakespeare's works. And that if there is an apocalypse, a pampered child actress could grow into a woman who could not only play Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but could also slay an attacker with the expert throw of a knife. It's also somehow comforting that no matter how dire conditions become on this earth, there will be people who will risk their lives to bring art to others, because, as it says on The Traveling Symphony's caravan, "Survival is insufficient."

Mary Lowry from Goodreads.com- reviewed this book-  adapted