I ripped through it yesterday in a few hours’ time. It was so… flimsy? Like more of a too-long short story or merely an outline of an idea? It was as if Mandel just had to get something, anything to the publisher to fulfill a contract real quick. The author character made me never ever want to write a book. The characters had no depth, the concepts weren’t fleshed out, and the vision of the future wasn’t credible to me. What did everyone else think?
I was.disappointed by it, and disappointed that I was disappointed by it. I LOVED Station Eleven and really really enjoyed The Glass Hotel, but I couldn’t get over that Sea of Tranquility felt like a poor attempt on Cloud Atlas. If you’re going to attempt a Cloud Atlas, it’s got to be so much better than the original and for me, Sea of Tranquility just…wasn’t.