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The Lola Quartet

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Gavin Sasaki is a promising young journalist in New York City, until he’s disgraced following a series of unforgivable lapses in his work. It’s early 2009, and the world has gone dark very quickly. The economic collapse has turned an era that magazine headlines once heralded as the second gilded age into something that more closely resembles the Great Depression. The last thing Gavin wants to do is return to his hometown of Sebastian, Florida, but he’s in no position to refuse when he’s offered a job by his sister, Eilo.

Besides, Eilo has shown him a photo of a ten-year-old girl who could be homeless and in trouble. The little girl looks strikingly like Gavin and has the same last name as his high school girlfriend, Anna, from a decade ago. Gavin, obsessed with film noir and private detectives and otherwise at loose ends, begins his own private investigation in an effort to track down Anna and their apparent daughter—an investigation that soon takes a surprisingly dangerous turn.

279 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2012

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About the author

Emily St. John Mandel

18 books23.4k followers
Emily St. John Mandel was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied contemporary dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York.

She is the author of five novels, including The Glass Hotel (spring 2020) and Station Eleven (2014.) Station Eleven was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the Morning News Tournament of Books, and has been translated into 34 languages. She lives in NYC with her husband and daughter.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,295 reviews
Profile Image for Andrew Smith.
1,132 reviews717 followers
February 13, 2024
Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel hasn’t yet published many books – four in fact – but I’m methodically making my way through them. I stumbled across the superb Station Eleven courtesy of some good reviews I’d seen on Goodreads and I then picked up Last Night in Montreal which I also loved. In my view, this one isn’t in the same league as the other two.


Told in her trademark style – that’s to say flipping back and forth in time and focussing on different characters, seemingly randomly – this tale gradually unfolds. The main focus is on Gavin, one quarter of the jazz quartet featured in the book title, and his girlfriend Anna. As their time at a performing arts high school comes to an end the quartet complete a final performance, at which point Anna disappears. Before she leaves she sends Gavin a final message, courtesy of a paper airplane that floats to him as the concert winds down. Needless to say, Gavin eventually decides to track Anna down, amid rumours as to why she may have absconded.

I’ve supplied a very abridged version of what is a somewhat complex plot. And I’ve deliberately sidestepped some key elements, as I don’t want to spoil it for others. Suffice to say the book is more a character study than a true mystery. In this sense it’s a clever, well written and (sometimes) finely observed account of a group of people whose hopes and dreams simply fail to materialise.

One problem I had with this book is that I really didn’t like any of the main characters. I didn’t become invested in their fate and therefore felt ambivalent to their setbacks and losses. I also felt that as the story rambled on the convoluted plot failed to hold my attention sufficiently for me to accurately track its progress.

I know some will view this book very differently and I’d therefore urge some caution in accepting my view. It is certainly well written and others will, I know, take a contrasting view.

If you haven’t read Mandel before then I’d urge you to start with one of the other books I’ve mentioned, above. If you’re already a fan then do take a look at this one; the quality of writing is certainly here and you may well find something I didn’t.
Profile Image for Angela M .
1,337 reviews2,163 followers
May 27, 2015

I loved Station Eleven so I was interested in trying one of Emily St. John Mandel's earlier books. While these are two very different stories, I was not disappointed. This book also illustrates the author's talent in weaving a story moving back and forth in time. I really like this mechanism because we get to see what brought these broken characters to their messy current lives ten years after high school .

Gavin , Sasha , Daniel , Jack , four high school friends and members of The Lola Quartet, a jazz group are the focus of the story . Ten years after high school, none of them are where they hoped to be . However , it is Anna , Sasha's younger sister whose actions have impacted each of these people that creates the circumstances under which these people are connected in the present. Liam, Jack's college roommate also plays a part in what happens . This is not to say that these people didn't have a hand in their own failures. Gavin is a disgraced journalist who loses his job for making up stories. Sasha is a recovering gambler lost her chances in college, and is not always able to stay clean. Daniel is a cynical cop and Jack , a drug addict . These are not exactly likable characters and neither is Anna. Yet there are glimpses of how they care about each other .

Sometimes these stories about old home town friends connecting after years are same old same old but this felt different somehow and I liked it . The mystery/crime aspect of it felt a bit contrived but I enjoyed this book mainly because of the writing and the skillful way that Mandel develops her characters .


Thanks to Random House /Knopf Doubleday and Edelweiss.

Profile Image for Jenna ❤ ❀  ❤.
853 reviews1,500 followers
March 18, 2023
This is the sixth Emily St John Mandel novel I've read and the first to not get five stars. However, it's still a really good story, even if I wasn't as invested in the lives of these particular characters and their stories as I've been with all the others.

I didn't find the main plot to be totally believable, which I think made it harder for me to really care about what happened. 

Ms. Mandel can tell a story though, even when it's not 100% plausible. 

I love how she manages to insert characters from other novels into each one. I'm sure I'm not the only one to enjoy when this happens, when we get to briefly reunite with characters we met in another book. It doesn't matter if one likes the character or not, it's still fun.... like having "insider information" or something. It's similar to how you feel when the setting of a novel is one you're familiar with.

Anyway, this is a good story even if not my favorite. 
Profile Image for christa.
745 reviews339 followers
August 4, 2012
The best of Emily St. John Mandel’s “The Lola Quartet” is concentrated in the novel’s first scene. Young teen mom Anna Montgomery is going about her daily ritual. She wakes early, bundles the bambino and stops at an all-night donut shop. From there she makes her way to a park where she sits on a swing and frets the bundle of more than $100,000 she’s got stashed in the stroller. A man appears in the distance.

Dun-dun-duh.

Unfortunately, that first burst of intrigue is wasted when the cast of un-likeable characters are put through series of coincidences that are unbelievable and lacking in impact. Put it this way: I’m reading a comic book right now that includes a talking guitar and I’m way more willing to shelf my disbelief for that little guy.

Fast forward to a decade after Anna’s moment in the park. We meet uber-pussy Gavin Sasaki, a young journalist working for the second-best newspaper in New York City. This isn’t the world of journalism that he imagined as a student at Columbia University. He’s into trench coats and fedoras and world-changing exposes. Instead he’s playing survival of the fittest in an ever-dwindling staff, hanging on to his job simply because he is one of the least expensive writers on the payroll. His editor sends him his hometown in Florida to write a story about the way swamp animals are infiltrating residential areas.

Gavin’s in a bad place. His girlfriend Karen has recently miscarried and left him, his shower is leaking and he fears that his return to Florida is going to trigger the heat strokes that hospitalized him as a kid.

When the unloveable loser gets to Sebastian, Fla., his sister Eileen passes along some alarming intel: The real estate agent was recently working on a foreclosure property and saw a young girl that looked exactly like her. When Eileen asked the girl her name, she replied “Chloe Montgomery.” Montgomery. As in, maybe related to Anna Montgomery, Gavin’s high school girlfriend who skipped town 10 years ago following a swirl of rumors that she was preggers. Eileen snapped a photo of the girl and shows it to Gavin. Alas, she was seen taken the photo and the homeowner ran her off the property, so Eileen doesn’t have any more information.

The news is distracting to Gavin, who continues reporting on swamp creatures and back in NYC he botches the name of a woman he interviews who had given him a sweet kicker quote he wanted to use to end his story. When he is unable to find the woman’s name, he invents one. This is the gateway drug to a world of invented sources and manufactured quotes that eventually get him fired from his job and land him back in Sebastian -- this time to live with his sister, assist her in her work and track down the mysterious Anna Montgomery.

The story goes from flashback to present day and shows the life paths of the members of Gavin’s high school music mates from The Lola Quartet. Jack, who had the most promise, is strung out on pain pills. Daniel has become a surly policeman in their hometown. Sasha, Anna’s half sister, is on the mend from a gambling addiction and working as a waitress at a diner. There is a bunch of stuff beneath the surface that Gavin never knew about his old girlfriend, or maybe refused to acknowledge. For instance, the young quartet groupie was banging David and when she found out she was pregnant, she hoped she was running off to Utah with the right sexual partner. It’s obvious when Chloe slides out that she has picked the wrong dude.

Mandel has aged these characters in a creaky and broken way and has given them life losses and laments befitting characters thirty years removed from high school, rather than just ten. And any character that wasn’t in the quartet is somehow linked to the quartet, including a semi famous musician from New York City -- who Gavin saw play Monday night gigs at a local bar, but is also Jack’s former roommate and, oh, it’s his mother who was watching Chloe Montgomery when Eileen spotted the child. A game warden who was a source in Gavin’s story about the animals is also Sasha’s friend from her support group. Mandel also seemed to make spur of the moment decisions on the back stories of her characters, adding things like BTW: Gavin and Eileen’s parents were awful and absent and Anna Montgomery was a real hell raiser. Why she liked Gavin, who is such a wienie, shrug.

I’ve seen a lot of reviews of this book that call it “lovely” and “engaging” and I can’t help but think I’m reading something different than the rest of the world. Did I download a rough draft? Because “The Lola Quartet” is really poorly conceived and hokey. It has the feel of a NaNoWriMo book that never should have landed in the real world.
Profile Image for Snotchocheez.
595 reviews415 followers
April 5, 2015
Only slightly less enthralling than her post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel's The Lola Quartet is a consistently engaging, refreshingly original novel that is so utterly underrated by my fellow GR readers (3.34? Really?) it blows my mind.

Ms. Mandel hooked me from the start: Young Anna, teen mom, is sitting on a playground swingset in Virginia with her infant daughter Chloe, with $121,000 stashed underneath the stroller. The mystery of how Anna becomes a young mother, hiding out. hundreds of miles from home with a monetary windfall alternates from a year prior, with her friends/sister in the Lola Quartet, a freeform jazz-playing ensemble from her Sebastian, Florida High School Arts Magnet, and fast-forwards a decade later with her jazz quartet friends Gavin, Jack, Daniel and sister Sasha (in varying states of directionlessness).

It's a bit rough around the edges (and, really, nothing at all resembling Station Eleven: no dystopia to be found here) but The Lola Quartet is another shining example of Ms. Mandel's boundless imagination. Don't be daunted by the GR rating. It's a fascinating literary display, and recommended.
Profile Image for Blair.
1,845 reviews5,239 followers
May 24, 2021
The Lola Quartet is one of Emily St. John Mandel’s three pre- Station Eleven novels, only made available in the UK after the success of the aforementioned book. It’s about four friends who play music together as teenagers, and what becomes of them ten years later. Gavin – the main character, as far as there is one – starts a journalism career in New York but, increasingly desperate to hold on to his job, invents some splashy quotes and is eventually found out. When he returns to his hometown in Florida, he becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to his childhood sweetheart, Anna, who disappeared after the quartet’s final performance at a school concert.

The story has a couple of things in common with the author’s later work: a narrative that flips back and forth through time, and characters who turn out to be connected in unexpected ways. There the similarities end. Most of the characters remain frustratingly obscure, the description is perfunctory, and the plot comes to nothing.

It all hinges on the fact that Anna (who is, aside from anything else, incredibly boring and unlikeable) once stole more than $100k from a meth dealer. However, the exact circumstances are concealed until the story is almost over; this made me assume (understandably, I think!) that there was going to be some interesting reveal or twist regarding how/why Anna ended up with the money.

Station Eleven is one of my favourite books, and I really liked The Glass Hotel too, but I wouldn’t recommend wasting any time on this one.

TinyLetter | Linktree
Profile Image for Iris P.
171 reviews215 followers
May 2, 2015

The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel

Its difficult to describe the exact literary genre The Lola Quartet falls under, it lives somewhere in the nexus of literary fiction and crime mystery. As as a character study with a noir flair, it works pretty well, as a mystery I found it somehow underwhelming and anti-climatic.

The Lola Quartet, the 3rd novel by Canadian-born writer Emily St.John-Mandel, with its sultry descriptions of run-down jazz bars, fedoras and trench coats felt definitively like Noir to me.

If you read St. Mantel highly successful 2014 Post-Apocalyptic "Station Eleven", you'd be familiar with her clear appreciation for the fine arts. Her background as a contemporary dancer clearly permeates into her style of writing and the role theater and classical music play in the case of Station Eleven and jazz and music in general in the case of The Lola Quartet.

The book which takes its name from the German film, Run Lola Run, alternates between the high-school years and present day lives of four friends from Sebastian, a fictional Florida suburb, who are all part of a high-school jazz band that goes by the same name.

Gavin Sasaki is a half-Japanese trumpet player, Daniel, the only African-American of the band plays the bass, Sasha is the drummer and Jack, who's perhaps the most talented musician of the group, is a Sax player and plays several other instruments. The 5th main character of the novel is Anna Montgomery, Gavin's girlfriend and Sasha's half-sister.

St. John-Mandel aptly describes how the love for music and their ability to create a unique sound when playing together is the bind that ties these teenagers together. Although I am far from being a virtuoso guitar player, I can relate to that wonderful feeling of connecting with others through music. When you find other players that "get" you sound and style of music and you get theirs, it creates a very special and unique bond.

Fast forward 10 years, the year is 2009, the economy has collapsed and the word is on the brink of another Great Depression. Gavin Sasaki is now in his late twenties, he's a journalist working for the New York Star and seemed to have a promising career ahead of him.

He's been assigned a story about Florida's exotic wildlife problem. For a whole set of reasons, Gavin isn't too excited about returning to his native South Florida, his inability to tolerate Florida's overwhelming heat for one and the estranged relationship he has with his parents, for another.

Upon returning to his hometown and reconnecting with his sister, Eilo now a real estate broker that specializes is foreclosed properties, shows Gavin a picture of a girl that bears an uncanny resemblance to both of them.

Eventually Gavin gets information that lets him to believe that Anna was already pregnant with his child when she mysteriously disappeared during The Lola's Quarter last high school concert. He strongly suspects that the girl Eilo recently spotted at a foreclosed property is indeed his daughter.

As a resident of South Florida, I think that the author's description of our landscape is spot on. She reliably describes Florida's suburban out of control sprawling, our exotic animal pet invasion (with now more than 56 non-native species firmly established in the Sunshine State) and the foreclosure crisis that more than 6 years into it, is far from over.

After finishing his assignment, Gavin returns to New York, only to be fired when his penchant for embellishing stories is painfully exposed. Following this very public humiliation, Gavin goes back to Florida and settles down with Eilo who has offered a job and a place to stay.

Gavin then becomes obsessed with finding Anna and Chloe, the little girl he believes is his daughter. Mandel skilfully peels back the layers to reveal how each member of the quartet became complicit in a series of bad choices.

What Gavin discovers along the way terrifies him. Anna had gotten herself into serious problems with some seriously bad and scary people. As the mystery unfolds Gavin is forced to make some life changing decisions as well as really take a look at himself and decide what to do about his own future.

The author has as clear talent for creating great stories with flawed characters and find a way to humanize them along the way. Although I didn't feel a strong connection with them, The Lola Quarter's beautiful writing, particularly when it relates to music, was good enough to keep me interested through the end.

******************************************************************************

Here's Emily St. John Mandel's Book Notes music playlist for her novel, The Lola Quartet. I highly recommend the piece by Nina Simone:

1. Tomaso Giovani Albinon's Trumpet Concerto in D Minor Op. 9 N° 2. Adagio, performed by Judetul Gorj Chamber Orchestra & Constantin Nicolae
2. "Summertime" – Nina Simone cover/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM_Nb...
3. "Grace" – Underworld
4. "Shade and Honey" – Sparklehorse
5. "All I Need" – Radiohead
6. "Lucky You" – The National
7. "Bei Mir Bist du Schöen" – Swing Dance Orchestra cover (Album: Live in New York)
8. "Ten Eleven" – Luff
9. "Free Fallin'" – Tom Petty
10. "Maybe It's Just Sleeping" – Luff

Profile Image for Elyse Walters.
4,010 reviews11.2k followers
January 23, 2013
Emily St. John Mandel is a talented-unique-writer.

This is her 3rd book. (I've read them all, enjoyed them all).

Its hard to put into words just what's so 'different' about this author. (but she 'is' different).

All three books have well-developed personalities of her characters!

Something very special about these books (the style of writing ---the stories themselves --the characters)...

Keep those books coming Ms. 'Emily St. John Mandel' (love your work)!
Profile Image for Albert.
420 reviews40 followers
February 5, 2024
This was the last of Emily St John Mandel’s novels for me to read, of what she has written so far. I look forward to more to come. This novel was certainly consistent in style with her others. There is something odd or “off” about Mandel’s characters that attracts me. They are bright people who have made some bad choices, or they are caught in unusual circumstances, or they just have trouble adjusting to what life has thrown them. Those characters combined with Mandel’s voice makes you feel like the world you have entered as a reader is just a bit different than the one in which we live.

In The Lola Quartet the story begins with high school students, some of whom don’t have the best home environments, but otherwise it seems normal. Anna, a junior, gets pregnant and doesn’t know what to do. She makes choices and the story unfolds from there. Some unforeseen but serious moral questions develop as a result, and we get to see how an individual’s life can be defined by their choices, the associated assumptions and the options that were not considered.

There were some weaknesses in this novel. The problem at its center seemed rather ordinary and predictable. Perhaps this was intentional to demonstrate that difficult moral questions can arise out of an obvious beginning. The plot hangs on several coincidental encounters between characters that don’t seem likely. These same coincidences may exist in Mandel’s other novels and either I didn’t notice them, or they weren’t as obvious. Despite these comments, I enjoyed The Lola Quartet and was curious how it would conclude.
Profile Image for Whitney.
227 reviews412 followers
January 12, 2020
I absolutely loved The Lola Quartet. Mandel has taken a seemingly simple story line and turned it into an examination of morality, justice, and impossible choices - all themes that crop up in her books. The beginning of the novel feels a bit like a murder mystery episode - small vignettes of characters with vague references to events that are only revealed later on in the story. I loved seeing the plot slowly contract, bringing everyone together into an unavoidable climax. The main question is, What would you do to save someone you loved? And part of her answer also shows us how easy it is for us to subconsciously turn a blind eye to the suffering of those around us.

It's an excellent novel, and one I loved almost as much as Station Eleven. She also has cameo appearances of characters who later appear in Glass Hotel, her upcoming novel. So if you are excited for the new release, make sure you read this one while you're waiting!
Profile Image for Jeanette (Ms. Feisty).
2,179 reviews2,049 followers
June 23, 2012
This story is just one long string of unlikely coincidences, but it must not have bothered me too much because I read the entire thing in just a few hours.

I think Gavin's downward slide began when he was too lazy call the landlord to fix the leaky shower. Every night while he was sleeping, that running faucet was like the aural equivalent of Chinese water torture, eroding his brain. End of sanity and common sense for Gavin. Permanent case of the stupids. No wonder Karen ditched him. Who wants a guy who ignores his plumbing problems?
Profile Image for PorshaJo.
487 reviews687 followers
December 18, 2023
Crazy. Second book in a row that discussed synesthesia and I've never heard it other books I've read. Then, a story that one of the characters in this book is writing....ends up being a big focus in Mandel's book The Glass Hotel. I've read all of Mandel's books and it's not the first time there were linked characters. I enjoyed this one even through I didn't find any good qualities in any of the characters. I wanted to hear more, I couldn't stop. The story is about four friends, part of the Lola Quartet, and how their lives are changed, intertwined, and how they have grown over the years. Many not for the better. I'm glad I finally read this one, but now I have no books remaining by Mandel to read. Guess I'll have to start them all over again.
Profile Image for Jaylia3.
752 reviews142 followers
May 12, 2015
2014’s Station Eleven captivated me with its story of life after a pandemic flu caused the collapse of society, and The Lola Quartet, an earlier novel by the same author, shares many of Station Eleven’s story elements, including a life during crisis theme, though here the disasters are on a smaller scale.

Gavin is unsettled by the news that he may have fathered a daughter by a troubled high school girlfriend who disappeared--so unsettled he makes mistakes that sabotage his NYC career as a reporter, though print journalism is in its death throes anyway and his paper shut down not long after he was fired. He moves back to Florida because an economic crash similar to (or the same as) the one of 2007-2008 has created a job opportunity for him with his sister, whose work involves foreclosing on homes--she has to use a punching bag to work off the stress. In his free time Gavin uses his investigative skills to try to find his old girlfriend and his daughter.

It’s a fraught enterprise, and he’s warned off it at every turn, but locating his missing daughter is not something Gavin can let go of. In the process he reconnects with the other members of his high school jazz quartet--his girlfriend’s half-sister was the drummer--but everyone’s life has changed drastically since the almost magical evening of their final concert outdoors on the back of a truck, and no one seems able or willing to help him.

As in Station Eleven there are several third person narrators, the writing is beautiful and evocative, and the story is riveting, moving, and complex. Both novels unfold while shifting back and forth in time, revealing information slowly--a technique that irritates me in some books, but author Emily St. John Mandel makes it feel artful. Though The Lola Quartet doesn’t involve the almost total disintegration of civilization, strangely it’s a darker, less hopeful tale than Station Eleven, with moral dilemmas and needless but inevitable tragedy giving it an uncompromising, maybe noirish feel.
Profile Image for Judith.
113 reviews15 followers
February 25, 2012
Four friends form a jazz band in High School, the eponymous Lola Quartet....add one more (the drummer's step sister/trumpet player's girlfriend) and you have the cast of characters playing in this story

You also have a pregnancy-kept-secret, a runaway, a theft of mucho $$$$ from a meth dealer, a ruined journalist, and a cold-blooded murder. Oh my!

Gavin and Anne were High School sweethearts, until Anne became pregnant, and decided to run away with Daniel (because he had a place to run to in Utah)....Anne spends a lot of time in turmoil, wondering if the baby will look half-Japanese, like Gavin, or Cocoa brown, like Daniel...Anna slept around a bit. Once the baby is born all pink and shiny, Daniel splits...and Anna steals over $100,000 from her crazy Meth dealer landlord....so begins her Life on the Lam....Meanwhile, 10 years on, Gavin's successful career as a journalist tanks miserably once he's caught faking stories...he has to return home to Florida to work for his sister, foreclosing properties....Jack the erstwhile Boy Genius is a Vicodin addict who spends his days reading books about jazz arcana...Daniel is an embittered police detective with a trashed marriage, two kids, and no life...Sasha the drummer spends her days hiding from reality..her nights working at a roadside diner..her spare moments devising a plan to save Anna from that hellhound Meth dealer..

The death of High School dreams...the harsh bite of reality...the way people we once thought we knew, can change into monsters...the way we accept all of this as "just life" but still keep an eye peeled over one shoulder...that's what this book is about. It's no "mystery" any more than life itself

While not earth shattering, I thought this was a good story, well told...it made me consider some of my youthful indiscretions...and what the fallout would have been, if i'd stayed in touch with people from college...and if anything would have survived from those friendships, besides regret

Recommended

4 Stars

***This was a Net Galley***
Profile Image for Katie Lumsden.
Author 2 books3,234 followers
May 21, 2016
I thought it wouldn't be as good as Station Eleven. I was wrong. Her characters are brilliant, her writing captivating and beautiful.
Profile Image for Judy.
1,762 reviews360 followers
May 15, 2012

I did not experience the unconditional love for this book that I felt after Emily St John Mandel's first two novels. This is not necessarily a bad thing because I could feel her growth as an author. The fine writing, the suspense, the great characters are all present but she has had a change of heart. Last Night in Montreal centered around a young woman whose bizarre childhood compelled her to wander ceaselessly. The protagonist in The Singer's Gun tried to outrun his criminal upbringing. Both of these characters were trapped by destiny but I got a sense of hope that each one would possibly escape.

The Lola Quartet, named after a four-piece band of high school kids, takes place ten years after (ha, another good band name) the four members have gone their separate ways. Like a chorus that comes around over and over, they are pulled back together in their crappy Florida town. Once again destiny has claimed them.

Mandel sticks with her usual themes: individuals in their twenties reaching towards a mirage of adulthood without any good examples, life lived on the fringes of normalcy, and questions of identity and connection. A mystery runs through it carrying brutal consequences stemming from money, drugs and paternity. This time there is a child involved; a ten-year-old girl who is blissfully unaware of the danger that surrounds her.

Set smack in the present moment with the fall-out from economic meltdown, suburbs composed of the same malls and fast food emporiums no matter the town, and criminals at every level of society, the novel reads almost like today's news. Many of us are in better shape than these characters but we are surrounded by them every day on the streets of our towns and cities.

I guess everyone in the story gets what he or she deserves by the end. No one changes much. By tiny increments but just as much because of something like karma, the truly bad are punished, the ones who can help others get a chance and the guys who started out as hopeless remain hopeless. Pretty dark stuff. I wonder where Emily St John Mandel will go from here. I wonder where the world will go from here.
Profile Image for Diane S ☔.
4,825 reviews14.3k followers
December 19, 2011
Four friends, and a girl who is the girlfriend of one and the stepsister of the only female, start a jazz quartet in highschool. It is their last concert and their last year in high school and they all have bright plans for the future. I can relate to this because I remember being in that position, didn't like jazz much, but music was always around. Thought at 17 I was all grown up and the future was limitless. A decade passes and the group is brought together again by a picture, find out their lives didn't turn out the way they thought and that things that seemed transparent back than, were different than they thought. As the story progresses from one to the other, secrets are uncovered and things that were kept hidden are brought to light. Loved this book, it was wonderfully written and I could really identify with the characters, maybe not their exact problems, but their hopes and dreams as a whole.
Profile Image for Belle.
541 reviews49 followers
May 13, 2019
This book reminded me of a time in my life in 2008 or 2009 when we were in an economic downturn. Mandel writes of that time with such clarity. She writes of Florida, a state that holds at least a little piece of my heart. She writes about 4 people that remind me strongly of my sister and a group of friends that she may have had. The book just felt familiar to me from the very first page.
Profile Image for Rachelle.
286 reviews21 followers
October 25, 2022
This is the fifth novel I’ve finished by Emily St. John Mandel. I love how she gives attention to minor characters, bringing them to life with quirks and dreams and flaws that distinguish them. They are all memorable. The plot is interesting. And the structure again seems flawless.

There were bits from previous novels again, which are fun to notice, including Alkaitis’s Ponzi scheme and mention of a song and the band Baltica from The Glass Hotel. I heard she refers to these ties throughout her novels as her multiverse. I love what she’s building.
Profile Image for Ellis.
1,225 reviews149 followers
October 1, 2019
I've been trying to not be held prisoner by the concept of sunk costs, so if I've gotten a whole 2/3rds of the way through a book but I am dreading picking it back up because it's gotten totally boring (Smilla's Sense of Snow, oh my, what happened to you?), I am forcing myself to let it go and move on; also, and this is not sunk costs but something else, maybe FOMO? But when I pick a book up and read 15 pages and am already side-eyeing the writing style or bizarre turns of phrase and I really don't like the characters even though I've just met them, I am forcing myself to let it go and move on (even though if I'd persevered it might well have been the greatest book ever). And it's really hard! Especially since this is one of my worst years for reading ever and I'm starting to suspect that my ability to read is a little broken. And so for all of those reasons, it was really nice to pick this up and after two pages be immediately into it and ultimately enjoy it a lot, and because I would really suspect nothing less from Emily St. John Mandel it's also nice to be vindicated.
Profile Image for Ellie.
160 reviews13 followers
September 23, 2020
This book was super boring. I understood what was happening, but I didn’t know why, or why the author had even bothered to write it down. I thought it was heading towards a bigger message that it ultimately didn’t achieve, so I was disappointed.

After loving Station Eleven I’m still going to give The Glass Hotel a try, but cautiously.
Profile Image for Catherine.
1,211 reviews81 followers
June 19, 2015
Station Eleven brought Emily St. John Mandel to my attention and she's quickly becoming my literary crush of Summer 2015. The Lola Quartet is not as amazing as SE, but it's still a lovely little onion with layers to be peeled away and enjoyed.

The Lola Quartet was the name of a jazz quartet at a performing arts magnet school ten years ago. Gavin Sasaki, arguably the main character of the book, did not pursue music, but earned a journalism degree at Columbia, although things have not been going well for him recently. Daniel, twice-divorced with four children, became a police officer. Sasha dropped out of school after developing a gambling addiction. Jack, the only one to pursue music after high school, is addicted to painkillers. In general, the cast of this book form a pretty good argument against sending teens to performing arts magnet schools.

Hanging on the periphery of the quartet was Sasha's younger half-sister, Anna, who became Gavin's girlfriend. Ten years ago, right around the time the rest of them graduated, she disappeared. Now Gavin's sister presents him with evidence that Anna may have a daughter that looks a lot like him. As Gavin's life continues to fall apart around him, he pieces together the story of what happened to Anna, which includes her stealing a very large amount of cash from a meth dealer.

The plot is full of connections and coincidences, but none of it rang false to me, maybe because I was captivated by Mandel's prose and her skillful arrangement of the story. (SE also contains its fair share of coincidences that didn't feel forced to me, so it seems to all be part of Mandel's beautiful, melancholy world view.)

Profile Image for Natalie.
28 reviews6 followers
April 7, 2019
Interesting story. But this is a rare book where I found myself despising all of the characters but the secondary ones. William Chandler, a former gambler, park ranger, and python killer. Eilo Sasaki, Gavin’s hard-working, loyal, brother-rescuing sister. The other characters can’t do the right thing to save their lives. Rather than an intense build-up and satisfying resolution, the book ends with a bit of a whimper.
Profile Image for Aoife Cassidy McM.
658 reviews240 followers
August 3, 2023
I’ve been reading ESJM’s early novels with a group of readers over the last couple of months, and we wrapped it up this week with her third novel, The Lola Quartet.

Set mostly in New York and Florida, The Lola Quartet is another shadowy, noir novel about someone on the run, and the butterfly effect one person’s actions can have on a much wider group.

It explores chance, coincidence, the financial crisis of 2008 and its effects, loneliness, isolation and parental struggles, wrapped up in imagery that is very much ESJM’s signature style - fedoras, unyielding climates, private detectives, darkness, money, hidden lives.

Gavin grew up in Florida and was a member of a jazz quartet at school with Jack, Anna and Daniel. After school, the group drifted and lost touch. Gavin fulfilled his ambition to be a “newspaperman” and is working at the New York Star when a chance encounter between Gavin’s sister and a child who she suspects to be Gavin’s, causes his life to unravel. Haunted by the past, Gavin ends up in pursuit of the truth, with far-reaching consequences for everyone involved.

Stylish, compelling, gloomy and noir, this was probably my favourite of ESJM’s early novels. Like The Singer’s Gun, it has similarities with and appears to sow the seeds for The Glass Hotel, which is fascinating to observe as a fan of her work.

If I was starting with her books, I’d probably still start with Station Eleven, then The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility, and then go back to her earlier books. I’ve appreciated them more for having read them last I think. 4/5⭐️
Profile Image for Ram.
695 reviews46 followers
July 2, 2022
Gavin Sasaki, Fired ingloriously from his job in a failing magazine for incorporating small lies in his work. Gavin’s last resort is to return to his hometown in Florida, where his sister, Eilo, runs a successful business negotiating the final sales of foreclosed homes. The job is an to some extent an investigative one and in the course of his job he takes a picture of a girl that resembles Gavin himself.

He remembers his girlfriend from age 17, Anna, her disappearance and he encounters rumors that she was pregnant.

His investigations into his own past, the past of Anna and the remains of the music group that he was a member of, the “Lola Quartet”, leads him back to his old friends and into an underworld of drugs and violence where “you pay with money, or you pay with your family.”

The book was very different from the first book I read by this author, Station eleven and it opened my appetite to read more from this author.
August 9, 2017


An exquisitely constructed literary thriller that pulls you in from its striking opening scene and holds your attention until the end, THE LOLA QUARTET is another solid novel from Emily St. John Mandel about the ripple effect of our decisions and their affects on unintended victims.

The opening scene of the novel is short but concentrated, the catalyst for the entire novel. We find 17-year old runaway, Anne, sitting in a park with her newborn baby with $118,000 strapped to the bottom of the stroller. Like in Station Eleven where Arthur Leander's death was the starting point, this moment with Anne is the catalyst here.

Anne was Gavin's high school sweetheart who disappeared after one of his concerts, running away with Gavin's friend Daniel after finding out she was pregnant. Years later, Gavin is a reporter at a New York newspaper, but loses his job after his boss discovers that he has fabricated quotes in stories he covered. This happened after his sister Eilo informed him that she saw a child who bore a striking resemblance to him at a home her company was foreclosing upon. Destitute and alone, he's forced to move back to his hometown in Florida with his sister and the search to solve the mystery of Anne and his daughter begins.

He starts with the members of his high school band, The Lola Quartet, and strangely enough they have a part in this complicated mystery going back ten years. We meet Jack the talented saxophonist whose life took an unexpected detour after Vicodin took over his life in college; Sasha, Anne's half-sister, who is now a waitress at a small diner trying to escape her own vices; and Daniel the reformed cop fighting for his own redemption.

Mandel's plot construction in this novel is absolutely stunning. There are an abundance of coincidences and character connections, sure, but it didn't ring false to me or feel forced. The story of Anne's disappearance and what led to her stealing all that money is told non-linearly through the point-of-view of the members of The Lola Quartet. The band's last concert—and last sighting of Anne—is replayed multiple times through different lenses as we learn what really happened.
“How far would you go for someone you love?”

The backdrop of the novel is desolate—the collapse of the housing market and the prescription pill epidemic. The bleak and oppressively sweltering Florida setting echoes the desperate and dire circumstances in which Gavin finds himself after losing his girlfriend, his unborn child, and his job in a short amount of time. Mandel uses Florida's swampy setting as a literary device, with the wildlife stalking out of their habitats and into ours, much like the way the characters' decisions come back to haunt them throughout the novel.

The novel has an almost-nostalgic feel to it, as Gavin and the members of the quartet are forced to revisit their past. I am so impressed with how this novel was crafted. There is something special about Mandel's writing style. While the writing and storytelling in this novel wasn't as strong as it was in Station Eleven, the story was so well-written and beautifully told.

* Thanks to Penguin Random House Audio for providing me with this audiobook for an honest review.

The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel



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Profile Image for Dan.
470 reviews4 followers
July 3, 2022
My second reading of The Lola Quartet and my least favorite of Emily St John Mandel's six novels to date. Beyond noir, just depressing characters in depressing situations in a bit of a slog of a plot. For an enthusiastic Mandel fan, The Lola Quartet is her only disappointment.
Profile Image for Richard.
1,367 reviews45 followers
August 17, 2016
I loved Station Eleven, but this one just wasn't as good.

I often read reviews that complain about "unlikable" characters and think that the problem is usually a lack of sympathy on the part of the reader. In this case, however, I suspect Mandel herself dislikes the people she has created. (Daniel is quite the dick, yo.) That can make for a fun book too, if there's action or reversals, but this just feels misanthropic. If the point was to highlight the justifications casually bad people make to themselves, I wasn't terribly interested.

The style, back and forth through time with shifting perspectives, is similar to that used in Station Eleven, but it seems much less justified with this story. I think it muddles and pads a narrative which would have been a yawn if it had been told in a more straightforward style. The smoke and mirrors add flash but not substance. There's also a labored metaphor about dangerous reptiles that were raised as suburban pets and are now thriving in the wild, although the losers drifting through this slow and predictable noir aren't exactly thriving.

I can't recommend this one.
Profile Image for Jamie.
10 reviews
October 14, 2016
I didn't feel that the author really did her homework about Florida and it honestly distracted me quite a bit from the story. We don't have basements here, for starters. I won't bore anyone with the geographical inconsistencies re: Boca Raton, Sebastian, and airports, but that was a thing too.
Profile Image for Stephanie.
763 reviews4 followers
May 13, 2022
This is an older book by Mandel, and I liked it so much that I really want to go back and reread 2 of hers that I have read, plus others that I haven't. My interest was piqued because other reviewers have mentioned that she weaves in characters from other books (I'm thinking her 3 most recent) and here, she just barely references a Ponzi scheme, the CEO Alkatis, and his young female companion Vincent (who identity here is not known). This book was written in 2012, The Glass Hotel in 2020, and I am just trying to imagine how Mandel mapped out all of this and I wonder if any of the characters or their families appear even briefly as victims of the scheme, or if Gavin--a journalist--is mentioned by name in The Glass Hotel. I can't remember. I think that Mandel is an extremely talented writer, quite amazing actually because her story can draw you in even if you don't connect with or like the characters. The Lola Quartet is a foursome of teen jazz musicians, plus 1 girlfriend, who break up upon graduation but rely on, and deceive, each other 10 years later and somewhat in between. I often found myself looking at them from a motherly perspective, wishing they would make better decisions, or have someone to turn to.
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