Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Reviewed by Jeanne

I’d had this book recommended to me several times but hadn’t gotten around to reading it.  When I ended up with a Book Bingo square requiring me to read a science fiction book, I gave in and picked it up. 

While this is indeed a beautifully written, thought provoking book, populated with complex and interesting characters, it is set in the aftermath of a global pandemic which has wiped out most of the human population.  That’s not the most comfortable read these days, and I found myself chilled reading the litany of things that ended, things that we have experienced (end of waving lights at concerts, end of swimming in community pools, end of going to movies) and things we haven’t and hopefully won’t: no electricity, communication, mail, antibiotics, and vaccines.  You can no longer take for granted that a cut won’t be fatal, Mandel tells us, or that you’ll ever see loved ones again in this life. 

As I said, not an easy read these days.

On the other hand, the characters pull you along as does Mandel’s meticulous interweaving of lives.  The book opens with a young man named Jeevan and his girlfriend attending a Shakespeare play.  Arthur Leander, a fading movie star, has the lead role of Lear when he suffers a fatal heart attack on stage.  Jeevan has been training as a paramedic, and he leaps on stage to try to help.  A frightened child actress cries, bewildered. As the crowd disperses, Jeevan learns from a friend who works in an ER that a terrifying epidemic has come to town via a passenger from an airplane: victims become ill and die within 48 hours and the virus is spreading like wildfire.  Jeevan goes to a store and begins buying supplies—including toilet paper, I must add.

Twenty years later, a woman is part of a traveling artistic troop that moves from settlement to settlement, performing Shakespeare plays and music.  She’s Kirsten, the child from the stage, and Arthur’s death was a pivotal moment in her life. She carries two comic books that Arthur gave her, strange books that no one else has ever heard of, and she searches everywhere they go to try to uncover more information.

The story flashes back and forth in time, introducing us to the young Arthur and to his wives—there will be three in all—and how his life and their relationships  have influenced the future.  It’s a tribute to Mandel’s writing ability that Arthur becomes a fully developed character, not a caricature of a shallow, philandering Hollywood actor.  He makes some bad choices, but he is basically a decent fellow.  His friend Clark thinks that the one word always associated with him is “kind.”

And in a way, that seems to be the heart of the story.  Most of the characters, at least the ones we follow, are kind, decent people. They are sometimes forced to do terrible things but they act for the good of friends and family, not just selfishness.  They give me hope for humanity.

Mandel glosses over the first years after the pandemic.  Most of the characters are too traumatized by what they have seen, and possibly done, that they’ve wiped it from their minds.  They’re focused on the now and a bit on the future.

Part of the fun for me was figuring out how the people we meet in the pre-epidemic times fit into the post-pandemic world. Sometimes it’s an action that lives on; sometimes it’s the person him or herself. I found myself guessing where things came from or if something would turn up again.  I was right sometimes and wrong sometimes, but I was always entertained.

I think it comes down to the fact that, ultimately, this is a hopeful book.  Hopeful that good people prevail, hopeful that life can continue, hopeful that art can sustain, just as it has through the centuries.  Several times it is pointed out that Shakespeare wrote during a time of plague; that people need poetry, drama, music, and visual art, even in the direst of times.

I’m glad I read this book. 

The Mountain Between Us by Charles Martin

Reviewed by Ambrea

Ben Payne is a surgeon with a busy schedule and Ashley Knox is a magazine writer, who is desperate to make it to her own wedding.  Together, they charter a small plane in the hopes of making it home before a blizzard strands them in Salt Lake City.  But when their pilot crashes, Ben and Ashley find themselves stranded in the High Uintas Mountains without food, without shelter, badly injured and hopelessly lost.  They will have to rely implicitly upon each other if they hope to survive.

The Mountain Between Us by Charles Martin is an absolutely wonderful book.  Primarily told from the perspective of Ben Payne, captured through snippets of his personal narrative and recordings he makes, The Mountain Between Us is one of those novels that’s hard to put down.  Although the suspense of the story—I literally spent hours wondering, would Ashley make it?  Was Ben going to survive?—kept me glued to the pages, I think the pacing had a lot to do with why I couldn’t seem to pry myself away for more than a few minutes at a time.

A recording separates nearly each chapter, giving readers a glimpse into the harsh realities of what Ben and Ashley face and, moreover, offering readers the opportunity to learn more about Ben’s life.  These little dividing chapters are not very long, but they have a lot of impact and they feel very intimate, very personal.  They also help to flesh out Ben’s character and give him a depth—a very human aspect—that I appreciated.

Although The Mountain Between Us is listed under Christian fiction, I noticed Martin uses religion with a very subtle touch.  Likewise, the romance isn’t forced—it builds very slowly and, more importantly, it doesn’t overshadow the fact that both Ashley and Ben are fighting for their survival.  The progression of their relationship feels natural, which I really liked, because, let’s be honest, if I were stranded and starving on a bleak mountainside with serious injuries, I really wouldn’t be thinking much about romantic intentions—even if he is Idris Elba.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading The Mountain Between Us for BPL Book Club and I look forward to checking out more from Charles Martin.

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter

Reviewed by Brenda G.

While in her teens, Georgia Hunter learned her grandfather, his siblings, and her great- grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Against all odds in far-flung locations, this nuclear family of Polish Jews lived through Hitler’s worst. This book presents a fictionalized account of the trials endured by the family.

The story begins with Addy, given name, ironically, Adolf, working in France as an engineer and wondering should he go home. In 1939 as Hitler’s march through Europe gains strength, Addy muses about what might be happening in Radom, the Polish city where the Kurc family lives. When he attempts to acquire travel documents to Poland, he is denied and told of the dangers he would face, with “Jew” clearly stamped on his passport. A trip home would require travel through German-controlled territory. 

Chapter by chapter, the focus moves to one or more family members and chronicles the miseries they face and the horrors they witness.  The horrors of a packed railroad car, watching others die around them. Months in a Gestapo jail.  Deportation to Siberia from Soviet-controlled Poland.  Starvation.  A special offer of transportation that turns into a death train from which less than a handful of Polish Jews walk away, including Addy’s sister Mila and her daughter. An infant born in the Siberian winter whose eyes are frozen shut every morning. Entombment in the basement of a bombed out convent. Scurvy. Attempts to rescue extended family and in-laws who refuse to accept help in the face of certain death. Work in the Underground. Securing false papers and passing as non-Jewish Poles. Disappearances without explanation.  Harsh working conditions; harsher living conditions; while constantly subjected to the whims of military and political forces.

The book is well-written and researched. Members of the Kurc family are hard-working, intelligent, and resourceful. Despite this, they are unprepared for the horrors unleashed upon them, their neighbors, and Europe as a whole. This is truly a remarkable tale of survival.

The Unthinkable: Ultimate Survivors

The Unthinkable:  Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why by Amanda Ripley (155.935 RIP Main)

How likely are you to perish in a disaster? What are the odds you will be involved in a disaster? The answers to these questions and many more can be found in The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why, by Amanda Ripley.

In her book Ripley, a senior writer for Time magazine, takes us through the various stages of disaster and cataclysm, examining how individuals react to catastrophic situations. Especially interesting is the fact that some people who should survive don't, while others survive against seemingly insurmountable odds.

I believe that having read this book could save your life if you are ever involved in a real disaster. Why? The first emotional reaction in a disaster is the one that might get you killed before you extricate yourself from a situation. That response is DENIAL. Oh, yeah, that's a big one. Apparently disaster is difficult for some people to accept when it falls into their laps, so instead of believing that the building is on fire and getting the heck out of it, they might dither around straightening the paper clips on their desk or looking at a phone list, increasing their chances of perishing. Yes, people really do this.


In 2005 the National Institute of Standards and Technology conducted a study based on interviews with World Trade Center survivors.  They discovered that survivors, on average, waited six minutes before exiting the building. The average dithering wait was six minutes, but some waited as long as forty-five minutes before deciding to exit the building.

During her research, Ms. Ripley interviewed Jack Rowley, an instructor at the National Fire Academy in Maryland. In thirty-five years as a firefighter, before becoming an instructor at the Fire Academy, he often witnessed this sort of lethargic response to fire.

Rowley told Ripley that one particular type of fire had come to seem like a Saturday night ritual. Firefighters would be dispatched to a bar where they would find customers sitting and nursing beers in a room that contained smoke.

It's pretty obvious in this situation that there is a fire somewhere near, but when firefighters would suggest to customers that they evacuate the response they got was often one like, "No, we'll be just fine."

Through her interviews with survivors, Ripley takes us on a voyage through a burning skyscraper, a sinking ship, and a crashed airplane.  In each case, most if not all of the survivors are those who were able to assess the situation and take some action instead of passively waiting for rescue.  You would think this would be an obvious move but there’s that denial thing again, plus in some cases an authority figure would tell the people to wait.  Often this was someone who wasn’t in the situation but was making a call from another location, yet people would ignore what was happening in front of them to take the advice of someone who was far away and safe.

This is a very educational read, but more than that, I would have to say that it's a readable read. It made me think about how I behave during a crisis and to rearrange some of my thinking. During the process of writing this review I found myself wanting to read the whole book again. One thing is for sure: whether I read this book again or not, you should be sure you read it for the first time.