Garrett’s Reviews > Exit Party > Status Update

Her use of the word "chaparral" is pleasing.

"I have lived my life in the ordered calm of the State, and I have always believed in its essential contract, which can be summarized as follows: The opposite of disorder is harmony. Peace is achieved through surveillance. Service is the surveillance department of the State. Harmony at any cost." (207)

Emily St. John Mandel is spinning 3 or 4 plates at the same time. This novel reminds the reader of Anthony Doerr's "Cloud Cuckoo Land". Only difference, in my mind, he spins 7 or 8 plates. Talented writer nonetheless.

"If you live long enough you become a migrant from another timeline. There's the world you learn to navigate as you enter adulthood, and then that world slips away from you by degrees, and after a while there's nothing left of it, but you're still here. That's what I mean."

"Sometimes it's clarifying to pose the question in reverse. What don't you want your life to be, Sebastian?" (149)

"What do you want?" He asked, after a while. The question unfurled into a dozen other questions that he didn't have to ask because they were all implicit--what are you doing here, what will become of you, etc--and I didn't tell him because I didn't know him well enough to try to express this, but what I wanted, actually, the thing I most longed for, was to get to live in a different kind of world."

"I wanted buildings constructed with an eye toward permanence. I wanted a place that wasn't overrun with warring militias."