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Michael DeConcini

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Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel (Goodreads Author)

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Michael DeConcini said: " I read this because it got rave reviews. I hated this book, and even though I'll read it through to the end, I don't anticipate that my sentiments will change.

The characters are flat and unlikeable. None of them really have much character. Mirella's I read this because it got rave reviews. I hated this book, and even though I'll read it through to the end, I don't anticipate that my sentiments will change.

The characters are flat and unlikeable. None of them really have much character. Mirella's "character" is that she's been stricken by tragedy. Olive's "character" is completely defeated by her being an almost unvarnished self-insert. Edwin is so uncharacterized I can't even write a description.

The world is terrible. Time travel can be done well, but if you're going to use well-trodden time travel tropes, they have to be supported by a solid plot, which this book does not have. The world of 2203 as depicted in Sea of Tranquility is a completely boring, flat vision of the future, and I have to wonder if Mandel chose to make it so similar to the present day because Olive has to have the exact same experiences and emotions that Emily Mandel does.

The social commentary is unbearable. I am a progressive person. That does not mean that I'm a dog who gets excited when you say the right words or make the right hand motions. Every attempt at progressivism in this book is tokenized to such a degree that it comes across insulting.

I think there's a good reason that most of the five star reviews on here basically describe the book from front to back. If you read this book with certain expectations, for example, being eager to sympathize with Olive because of her struggles as a female author, you can fill in the blanks to make it effective. If you, like me, pick it up because you happened to see it on a list of good reads released in 2022, you will instead find Olive to be a shallow character whose struggles fail to elicit any sort of emotion.

I think this books' wild success is indicative of the intellectual poverty affecting all types of literature these days. Readers and journalists are so primed to read books that even lightly brush on real-world topics that they lose any critical sense they may have. This book sucks. It's not well written, and it's not "important" as many people claim it is. If you approach it with certain expectations, hoping to extract validation from its depictions of sexism, LGBT issues, or pandemics, you can probably make that happen for yourself. I couldn't. I can get invested in any sort of story; if this were about a woman struggling with sexist attitudes in her field, or a story about a future society with radically different values than ours, it could impress me. However, this book isn't about anything. It tries so hard to be so many things that it ends up being nothing. ...more "

Aug 29, 2022 06:39PM · see review