Family Book Swap: Sea of Tranquility

Title: Sea of Tranquility

Author: Emily St. John Mandel

via Target

Edwin is an English aristocrat exiled by his family to Canada in 1912.  Mirella is a receptionist in 2020 New York.  Olive is a novelist on a book tour in 2203.  Their lives are connected by a shared, extraordinary experience and by their encounters with a time traveler, Gaspery Roberts.  Perhaps coincidentally, they are also connected by the fact they each had these experiences immediately prior to a global pandemic.

To tell more about the story would be to give too much away.  I already fear I've said too much.  And it would be a shame if my post did anything to discourage anyone from reading Sea of Tranquility.  It was my most rewarding read in quite a long time.

I read a lot of books and enjoy most of what I read.  What I long for, though, is a book that makes me want to do nothing but curl up in a corner and lose myself in the narrative, perhaps even to forget that I'm reading.  I want to be invited into a world I hate to leave when the book is over.  That level of immersion has been much more difficult to find as an adult than it was as a child.  It's possible, of course, that I've been reading the wrong books.

Sea of Tranquility is the closest I've come to realizing that ideal in years.  The fact that it's a time travel story is all the more extraordinary.  As frequent visitors to The Squid have likely caught on, I approach such stories with great skepticism and tend to leave them annoyed and frustrated.  Mandel's take on the concept didn't bother me.  She certainly deserves credit for tidiness - time travel has rules in this book and she sticks to them.  And the answer to the central question - which I won't reveal - satisfies me.  I cared a lot more about what happened to the characters, especially Gaspery, than I did about the time travel consistency.  I can assure you, that is not easily said for me.  Mandel also deserves a lot of credit for a relatable rendering of the lockdown experience as well as a vision of the future that is not overly sensationalized.  

A snippet that spoils nothing but does exhibit the emotional intimacy Mandel allows the reader to have with her characters:

She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn't entirely parse why this made me feel so awful.  There's a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.

So yes, I would love to read more books like Sea of Tranquility.  Bravo!