Sea of Tranquility

2.5/5. I'm honestly a little conflicted, I kinda feel like this didn't work for me as much as it did for so many other people, given the amazing reviews on GR. Timey-wimey plots are always a hit or miss with me, and more often a miss, but that wasn't actually my main beef with it.

Firstly, I felt like there were so many interesting messages and themes that were touched on but then never explored - like the criticism against British colonialism at the beginning, and then it suggested an interesting link between the pandemic crossing borders with how colonizers brought diseases to indigenous peoples across the world. But then we barely got time with that thought before we go into some timey wimey plotline.

The time travel plot is fine in itself but I also feel like it wasn't as much explored as it could've been and I guess by the end of the book, I was just left with a deep sense of, “What was the message here? What was the point of this book?” If we're meant to just read this as a simple time travel plot without any reference to the larger commentary, then there's so much about the worldbuilding and storytelling that I couldn't get behind. I couldn't quite connect with any of Gaspery's motivations because it all just happened so out of the blue without any in-depth explanation. Why did he give up on his degree of criminology? Why did he want to join the Time Institute and why was he suddenly so passionate about it at the drop of a hat? It all seemed so convenient that a completely unqualified person like Gaspery without any necessary qualifications only needed a shoo-in interview with Ephrem to become what seems to be a highly skilled and professional job like being a time traveller.

I was also really confused about an entire segment (basically the whole part with Mirella and Vincent. I know Vincent played some part in the main story here but there was so much time spent on Mirella and her husband and the Ponzi scheme and Vincent's mysterious disappearanceThen I read some GR reviews and realised that this whole thing was basically a trailer leading to St John Mandel's *other* book, Glass Hotel, which I haven't read and therefore all of this didn't make sense to me. That was a bit annoying tbh... I like intertextuality but it's still gotta make some sense to people who may not have been exposed to that other work, especially since this isn't a series and isn't advertised as a continuation of anything. While the events referred to didn't turn out to be an integral part of this plot, to me as someone who hasn't read Glass Hotel, it felt like a plotline that could be important enough to warrant so much time spent dwelling on it by the characters but ultimately just went nowhere. The Station Eleven reference was a bit more subtle and therefore better, but both of these references still felt more gratuitous than anything. I feel like the author was trying to break a lot of 4th wall here, cos also why did one of the characters need to have a "double-sainted" name besides making reference to herself? I don't mind authors breaking the 4th wall but a lot of this just all felt frustratingly gratuitous and not actually serving any purpose.