SEA OF TRANQUILITY by Emily St. John Mandel

I loved Mandel’s Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, but this novel was a disappointment for me.  I also generally love time travel novels, including Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and Scott Alexander Howard’s The Other Valley.  In this book, however, I was never invested in the characters, and the plot was just too complicated.  If ever there was a novel that demanded a reread, this is it.  About halfway through the novel I realized that Gaspery, born in the 2400s, is the main character. He grew up in a domed colony, nicknamed Night City because the lights were too expensive to repair, on the moon.  His sister Zoey works for the mysterious Time Institute on Earth, and Gaspery secures a position as a time traveler for the Institute.  Zoey warns him that the job is dangerous, since the Institute will not tolerate interference in the past.  The characters whom he visits in the past are introduced in the first half of the book, and by the time Gaspery’s visits take place, I had forgotten the details of these characters’ lives.  The author does not address how Earth survives global warming nor how life is different on Earth four centuries from now.   In fact, everything is about the same, except for colonization and travel to and from our moon, as well as Saturn’s moon, Titan.  Of course, the time travel is futuristic, if you believe that we will be able to do that someday, but Mandel really has something else in mind with the time travel, and I didn’t buy that at all.  My favorite incident in the novel is when Gaspery learns that his cat is an unwitting time traveler who came from 1985.  Gaspery is stunned by that revelation, but as Zoey says, “Honestly, Gaspery, what difference would it make.  A cat’s a cat.”  Priceless.