Book Review: Last Night in Montreal

Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel

When she is seven, Lillia's father abducts her--her arms heavily bandaged--from her mother's home. They spend the next nine years traveling across states, changing names sometimes daily.

At 22, Lillia doesn't know how to live in one places, and she leaves a string of abandoned loves behind her in cities across the United States. When she leaves Eli in Brooklyn, he determines to find her. Eventually, he travels to winter-bound Montreal, where he meets Michaela. She claims to know where Lillia is but will only tell Eli if he tells her about a car accident that happened when Lillia was sixteen. He refuses--daily--for weeks.

Eli and Michaela continue to meet, sharing every other thought and story but the one the other so desperately wants to hear.

The book flashes from moment to moment, from character to character: Lillia on the road with her father and then on her own, leaving clues in hotel Bibles; Eli tracing her path and searching, increasingly frustrated; Michaela, abandoned by her absent mother and father--the private investigator trailing and then haunted by Lillia, who was badly injured in a car accident when Lillia was sixteen.
It ends tragically, and although the character may not get entirely what they want by the last page, they do find a measure of peace.
Compared to Station Eleven, this book has a much darker, less hopeful tone. Where Station Eleven speaks of hope and the triumph of humanity, this one speaks more of loss and learning to live with that loss. There is still hope here, still great love and compassion and sacrifice, but because of the echoing emptiness from both the setting and some of the characters, I would recommend Station Eleven over Last Night in Montreal. That is not to say it's not a beautiful book or a well written one. It is both. It's just that I can set down Station Eleven with a sigh of peace and small smile of contentment, but I set down Last Night in Montreal with an ache in my throat and a fierce need to hug each of my loved ones for a very long time.

Book Review: Station Eleven

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
The novel begins in a theater in Toronto where aging actor Arthur Leander is playing the role of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary is watching from a front-row seat as Arthur flubs a line, stumbles, acts confused, and collapses. A medic-in-training, he recognizes the signs of cardiac arrest and leaps onto the stage and begins CPR. Arthur dies there, amid falling plastic snow, the curtain mercifully drawn, the other actors--including young Kirsten Raymonde--standing in shock and dismay.
That night, as Jeevan wanders home through the snow, his friend calls him from a hospital, telling him that the Georgian Flu that had lately been mentioned in the news is fast on its way to becoming a pandemic. The friend warns Jeevan to get out of town immediately. Instead, Jeevan goes to his wheelchair-bound brother's apartment after stopping at the grocery store for carts full of supplies.
The novel then leaps in time two decades, and we learn that the pandemic was indeed devastating, with a 99.9% worldwide mortality rate. Society fractured and decayed, and most of the survivors live in very small communities, each day a struggle.
Kirsten Raymonde, the young child actor, is now a young woman, and she is part of the Traveling Symphony which migrates back and forth along the shores of Michigan performing orchestral works and Shakespeare's plays. Their motto is lifted from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager: "Because survival is insufficient."
And really, that is one of the keys to this book. In this post-pandemic world, the things that help people grow and survive are the bonds they forge with each other and the beauty they create together. The book is told unfolds in both past and present, weaving the stories of Arthur; his first wife, Miranda; his second wife, Elizabeth; his friend Clark; Jeevan; and Kirsten. We learn who they were and who they are, we mourn what they have lost, and we look with hope at what they create.
Post-apocalyptic stories are often dark, full of violent struggles to survive. Instead, this book is a symphony of praise for the beautiful world we have, the world we take for granted, where we can flip a switch and have light, turn a dial and have heat or cold, touch some buttons and call a friend. We forget to be thankful for that, and in this time of global pandemic, it is good, in my opinion, to dwell on what we have, not what we don't have.

Books Read in 2019

The following is the list of the books I read last year, with highly ranked books in bold font:

1. California by Edan Lapucki (8/10)
2. Food Rules by Michael Pollan (7/10)
3. Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee (7/10)
4. The Labyrinth of the Spirits by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (8/10)
5. Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (6/10)
6. The Valley at the Centre of the World by Mallachy Tallack (7/10)
7. Neverhome by Laird Hunt (8/10)
8. Little by Edward Carey (8/10)
9. The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (7/10)
10. Transcription by Kate Atkinson (6/10)
11. The Clockmaker's Daughter by Kate Morton (8/10)
12. The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti (9/10)
13. Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen (7/10)
14. The Secret Lives of Dresses by Erin McKean (6/10)
15. Golden Urchin by Madeleine Brent (8/10)
16. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (10/10)
17. I Am an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire (6/10)
18. Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates (7/10)
19. How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball (9/10)
20. The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty (9/10)
21. The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley (9/10)
22. The Kingdom of Copper by S.A. Chakraborty (8/10)
23. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley (9/10)
24. A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball (5/10)
25. Cooked by Michael Pollan (8/10)
26. Wool by Hugh Howey (8/10)
27. The World to Come by Dara Horn (9/10)
28. The Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman (6/10)
29. And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini (7/10)
30. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson (9/10)
31. The Heaven of Animals by David James Poissant (7/10)
32. The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman (7/10)
33. Tales from the Inner City by Shaun Tan (9/10)
34. On the Come Up by Angie Thomas (8/10)
35. The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan (7/10)
36. The Wind Is Not a River by Brian Payton (8/10)
37. Day of Tears by Julius Lester (8/10)
38. A Guide for the Perplexed by Dara Horn (8/10)
39. The River by Peter Heller (9/10)
40. If, Then by Kate Hope Day (7/10)
41. The Secret Wisdom of Nature by Peter Wohlleben (8/10)
42. A Pocketful of Crows by Joanne Harris (7/10)
43. The Bird King by G Willow Wilson (9/10)
44. The Humans by Matt Haig (9/10)
45. How to Stop Time by Matt Haig (6/10)
46. Loteria by Mario Alberto Zambrano (7/10)
47. The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker (7/10)
48. Minnow by James E. MeTeer (5/10)
49. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (10/10)
50. Marvel and a Wonder by Joe Meno (7/10)
51. The Staff by Ron Samul (7/10)
52. The Lost for Words Bookshop by Stephanie Butland (8/10)
53. Living Well, Spending Less by Ruth Soukup (7/10)
54. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (10/10)
55. The Fish Can Sing by Halldor Laxness (5/10)
56. Zero Bomb by M.T. Hill (8/10)
57. Last Tango in Cyberspace by Steven Kotler (9/10)
58. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (9/10)
59. Slade House by David Mitchell (8/10)
60. Ghostwritten by David Mitchell (10/10)
61. Tears of the Truffle-Pig by Fernando A Flores (5/10)
62. The Accidental Further Adventures of the 100-Year-Old Man by Jonas Jonasson (6/10)
63. Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell (9/10)
64. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (10/10)
65. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (10/10)
66. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (10/10)
67. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (10/10)
68. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (10/10)
69. Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (7/10)
70. Shift by Hugh Howey (7/10)
71. A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman (10/10)
72. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson (10/10)
73. Dust by Hugh Howey (7/10)
74. Nest by Kenneth Oppel (9/10)
75. The Body Lies by Jo Baker (10/10)
76. The Porpoise by Mark Haddon (9/10)
77. Walking on the Ceiling by Aysegul Savas (5/10)
78. What We Eat Now by Bee Wilson (9/10)
79. The Feed by Nick Clark Windo (7/10)
80. The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson (9/10)
81. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (10/10)
82. The Light Between Oceans by ML Stedman (8/10)
83. The Emerald Storm by William Dietrich (7/10)
84. Birdology by Sy Montgomery (10/10)
85. The Motion of Puppets by Keith Donohue (8/10)
86. Another Turn of the Crank by Wendell Berry (8/10)
87. The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by HG Parry (8/10)
88. Educated by Tara Westover (8/10)
89. The Good Good Pig by Sy Montgomery (8/10)
90. Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (8/10)
91. Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl (10/10)
92. The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higa Shida (9/10)
93. Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott (7/10)
94. The City of Brass by SA Chakraborty (9/10)
95. The Kingdom of Copper by SA Chakraborty (8/10)
96. Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky (7/10)
97. The Philsopher's War by Tom Miller (9/10)
98. Buzz Sting Bite: Why We Need Insects by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson (9/10)
99. Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World by Jeff Gordon (8/10)
100. Strange Harvests: The Hidden Histories of Seven Natural Objects by Edward Posnett (9/10)
101. Family of Origin by CJ Hauser (8/10)
102. The Way through the Woods by Long Litt Woon (7/10)
103. The Border Keeper by Kerstin Hall (8/10)
104. We Are the Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer (8/10)
105. Things That Fall from the Sky by Selja Ahava (7/10)
106. Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl (10/10)
107. How to Be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis (6/10)
108. Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy by Anne Boyd Rioux (7/10)
109. Kopp Sisters on the March by Amy Stewart (6/10)
110. Have You Eaten Grandma? by Gyles Brandreth (8/10)
111. Movies (And Other Things) by Shea Serrano (9/10)
112. Out of Darkness Shining Light by Petina Gappah (6/10)
113. Stronghold: One Man's Quest to Save the World's Wild Salmon by Tucker Malarkey (10/10)
114. Ghostwritten by David Mitchell (10/10)
115. The Unicorn in the Barn by Jacqueline K Ogburn (9/10)
116. Disaster's Children by Emma Sloley (4/10)
117. What We Talk about When We Talk about Books by Leah Price (7/10)
118. When Less Becomes More by Emily Ley (7/10)
119. Fibershed by Rebecca Burgess (9/10)
120. The Art of Frugal Hedonism by Annie Raser Rowland with Adam Grubb (9/10)
121. The Novel Habits of Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith (5/10)