Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I grabbed this book after reading Emily St. John Mandel’s amazing “Station Eleven,” wanting to read anything and everything she ever wrote.
This wasn’t “Station Eleven,” but, then, this was also her first book. Her writing was really polished, even in this book, and the different narrative threads were handled well. I didn’t particularly believe Eli’s suddenly urgent need to go to Montreal when he just didn’t show that impulse in any of the other things we know about him. He didn’t even seem all that close, early in the book, to Lilia, that her departure would warrant him leaving Brooklyn for Montreal to get her back or check on her or whatever it was he was doing. His lengthy stay in Montreal, being stalled by Michaela, the daughter of the private eye who goes off the deep end and dedicates his life to searching for Lilia, the abandoning of the daughter by the former circus performer private eye, all of this just didn’t ring true for me, I didn’t buy it. I kept questioning the motives of the people acting, as if they were being forced to do the things they were doing by some unseen hand (the author’s).
I’m still looking forward to her next book, but my expectations, which were sky high after Station Eleven, are a little more tempered now.

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