Station Eleven

From Goodreads:

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur's chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.

Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten's arm is a line from Star Trek: "Because survival is insufficient." But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.

Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleventells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it

From Me:

This is the book! The one in which I made the quiche to discuss it by.

The quiche is in the previous post---and no, you don't have to make it to discuss the book by, but it's really good, so maybe you should just make it.

 

I wanted to read this book because, for a short while, it was buzzing around all the blogs I read.  That, and it was recommended to me at a bookstore.

 

I am giving it 3 stars.  I liked it.  Didn't love it.

My friend Robin, who was at the book discussion said it was like  'Mad Max' meets 'Children of the Corn'.

(with characters who played the violin and recited Shakespeare.)

I usually love a good dystopian novel---and don't get me wrong---I really did like this one, but I didn't really connect with the characters.

I thought the writing was good, the  story line was interesting, but I guess I just wanted a bit more character development.

 

There were some really  unique characters in this book, but you never really got to know them well.  And in the traveling symphony, they didn't even call each other by name, they called them by their position (first clarinet, etc), which, for me, put a distance between the characters.

 

I would recommend it tho, if you like dystopian.

 

I found it funny/interesting,  all the reviews on Audible are bad, but on Goodreads they are mostly positive.