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 ...

The room basically agreed the Station Eleven was a better novel than Glass Hotel. Mostly, that revolved around the fact that it was a work of genre fiction. Since Mandel had a smart plot device of a world-destroying plague that all the characters survived, it gave her a nice way of creating believable connections, provided an excuse for dramatic personality shifts, and justified a history and context that's more sketched than fully drawn. In other words, we just felt that Mandel's style worked much better in this genre work than in her more literary attempt in the latter novel. In particular, we really like the relationships between the characters. Their idiosyncracies and the way they particularly relied on each other felt very real to us. The setting was a mixed bag for us. Some of us felt the bleakness of the post-apocalyptic world was too violent and antisocial, but many of argued that independent of any reality of what a world ending event might be, FICTION of the apocalypse is unrelenting negative on human comity and generocity, so by contrast, Mandel's take on it was a breath of fresh air. Mandel has some very good writing in this book, both in the gestures to the terror of the plague and in the characters' memories and vague references to the violence that followed. But the plot was just to convenient. Everyone read the same comic? All the main mover in the troupe and the cult are actually related? It all came together too easily and gimmicky. But that was a minor flaw in an otherwise fresh and compelling take on a pandemic and the world after.