The City of Mirrors

This was a very remarkable novel.
It was the last part of the trilogy known as The Passage, which is also the name of the first novel. The second, The Twelve, was very entertaining, but I had my doubts about this one. Why, you ask..
I've had bad experience with any kind of -ilogy's ending badly.. and I don't mean that they end up all dead or something other I didn't see coming, but that the ending just sucks. The Dark Tower comes to mind when I think of bad endings.

The City of Mirrors didn't deliver, which means that it was superb in how well it all connected. Maybe the ending was kind of a stretch and it had that 'all's well, ends well' vibe to it, but I was just glad that most of the characters I've come to like did have a chance at a future beyond my knowledge.

But enough about the ending, it took me about 800 pages to get there in the first place and those pages were filled with all kinds of shenanigans. We start at Kerrville which is filled to the brim with people, no virals have been detected for over three years and debate about whether to settle outside the walls is heavier than ever. There just isn't enough room inside the walls for everyone.
We get a glimpse at how everyone is doing, before we jump 20 years later.
Most of the groundwork lain in the first chapters is well developed.
Peter Jaxon is President, but his jurisdiction is dwindling, since more and more people emigrate towards the various townships, as also his son is about to do at the beginning of this part. Caleb and his wife want to try their hands at farming.
Of course that's when things go awry.
It starts slow in the beginning..

Another part of this novel is the introduction of Zero. We get to know him better. His past is delved into, so we see the reasons for the hatred he harbors for humanity. This was a part of the novel I liked, but not to the extent that it made me feel sympathetic for this character. His history felt a bit like he hadn't lived it, but rather borrowed it from a movie or book. It was a bit one-dimensional. But I still liked it, simply because it was a nice break from the day to day activities of the survivors.

Cronin wrote a well-paced ending for this wonderful trilogy. Even if you're not into vampires or zombies or a cross-over of the two, it's a novel you could like. The virals may be vampire or zombielike but actually the main theme feels more like a disease that's gone out of control, much like in the novel 'I am Legend' by Richard Matheson.

I'm anxious to see how the adaptation translates this material to the big screen.

The Twelve

It wasn't what I expected.
Don't get me wrong. This novel was really good and it got me hooked  right away. When I first started reading it, I felt I was lost. It had been too long since I had read the previous installment, so I couldn't make head or tail of the story.

But with a quick detour to the first novel which I enjoyed more the second time around I was plunged deeply into the world as they knew it.

But it wasn't what I had expected.
The Passage was a kind of coming-of-age. A group of survivors banding together to fight the big bad evil. The end of the novel suggested that they had to do that a couple of times before the world was safe again and I thought it might be a bit like Tolkien's The Two Towers, a kind of passage in its own way, travelling the distance to these enemies.

But it wasn't. Not even close. Its unexpectedness made it great on its own.
At first you're brought back to the heyday of the outbreak and you get some sense of the lineage of the main characters.
Then we're back in Texas and it seems that the Babcock colony isn't the only one farming humans. But the strategy of the 12 initial virals has changed with the death of Babcock. They are flocking together.

I admit that the story isn't flawless. Some things were dramatized, others left hanging, but the overall story did carry these mistakes and made them in their own way necessary. It felt like it all served a purpose which is why I love to read novels. Questions at the end might be necessary sometimes, but I do like a wrapped story with no loose ends.

The only thing that bothered me and I didn't even realize it did until I finished it and was thinking what to write about it. What I'm talking about is that because of the novel being written by a man (I guess that's the main reason) is that there's not a female protagonist without super powers. Amy and Alicia carry part of the story, but they are special in their own way. Other than them, there's no strong female voice.
Sara might be an obvious choice but she's more carried by the story than altering the events herself.
Nina, part of the guerrilla in Iowa, plays her part mostly off scene.
Not that they don't add a little panache to the story, but I'd like to have seen more of it.

But I do want to end this review by saying that this has to be a fantastic take on the vampire notion. Its scientific approach in the beginning, with the supernatural part blooming when science has failed, makes this one interesting read. After the dark comes light, but it also implies that after enlightenment comes darkness again.

Read it.. you won't regret it!!

The Passage

I know that I'm supposed to be reading The Twelve, the second installment in this series by Justin Cronin, but while I was reading that novel I couldn't make sense of everything that happened. It's not entirely a sequel to The Passage because it has some flashbacks which were hard to follow since it had been a while since I read the first installment.

Of course with a deadline of October 24th (when The Twelve is required back in the library) I wasn't too thrilled with having to read The Passage first, a novel almost 1000 pages long, but I'm glad I did.

The Passage is a very well written novel which I have reviewed once before. Before the birth of this blog.

This novel has been compared with The Stand before I even knew what it was all about. 

That's the reason I picked it up. 
I'm not disappointed, as you can tell by my score, but it didn't stand up to the Stand. (Don't mind the pun). 

Why not? 
1. The characters stayed rather bland. You get a feeling for them, some sort of hope that they will be alright, but none of the horrific events that happen to them really gets to you. In the Stand I was one with them, they hurt, and I hurt, they were laughing and I was happy. 

2. Somewhere right after the outbreak of the virus and before the series of unfortunate events at the colony, the story faltered in its pace. It ran out of gas and continued very slowly, sort of speak. 

3. The different story lines that felt like they were tying in together, suddenly were left hanging. I felt this at the end when the colony was reached again. I would've wanted to know what happened there. 

Maybe it isn't fair to compare it to another novel, just because it has certain similarities and when you view it on its own, it's a very good novel. 
And I'm even doing what I hate.. playing the waiting game until the next installment comes out. 

 I read it the first time in August 2010, which seemed like an altogether different time. It was the month where we bought our house (where we still live), it was before having children, but we were already trying. Strange to feel my opinion changed in regard to this novel.

Where I seem to have my doubts about character plot and a lagging story line, I didn't feel the same this time around.
I have read the novel in as little time as 10 days, about the same amount of days it took me the first time, which is quite a feat considering its length.
Why do I feel different though?
I think that I didn't compare it to anything.
It was an entertaining story, sufficiently scientifically founded and filled with characters which I could identify with. Especially Wolgast and Peter.

The story itself, for those who are living under a rock, is about a medical experiment going awry and the world, or North America at least, flooding with the consequences of twelve + the zero changed beings that behave like vampires.

The story starts in a world a few days before the outbreak and stays briefly on track with Wolgast, a FBI agent, taking care of a little girl whose life has been significantly changed by the experiment.
From there we jump about a hundred years in time and we get to know the Colony, a group of survivors in a wasteland of Virals (the ones bitten by the initial twelve).
When things begin to escalate a small group begins a journey towards the mountains of Colorado where everything began.

It's engaging, this story. I can't remember a moment where I thought it could've done with some better editing. With its 980+ pages, it still felt succinctly.
I'm not going to wait any longer, reading the next installment and maybe I was a fool with waiting so long for the second book to beckon me, but on the other hand I got to enjoy the first one again and when I'm done with The Twelve I can quickly go on to The City of Mirrors. 

And as I remarked several times to my husband, I couldn't believe this hadn't found its way to the big screen yet, a quick search on google has satisfied that the world hasn't gone completely crazy and an adaptation is coming early 2019, which is not so far away!!