PositiveThe Newtown Review of BooksEmily St John Mandel takes us on a delightfully strange journey through time in her latest novel ... There’s a sort of elegance in the novel’s bursts of prose, structured into short chapters ... This novel contains a lot about and is heavily inspired by COVID-19, which could potentially be wearying, depending on whether you feel that it is too soon to be reading about such things. But I found what this book had to say about pandemics and lockdowns. and the strange sort of denial that occurs before the word ‘pandemic’ actually gets used, oddly wholesome. There are some good points about the benefit of hindsight, too, as well as some interesting historical details about past pandemics, without being heavy-handed ... Think of this story as some wacky, beautiful quilt. You probably won’t understand how it all fits together until the end, but it really doesn’t matter as you’ll enjoy the ride.
