The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin

By -
The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin


I can only imagine how difficult it can be to end a series. Your fans have high expectations about what is going to happen. They are eager to jump back into the experience and as an author you are competing with your own work. I am a huge fan of Cronin. I read the first two novels in this series when they came out. I even re-read The Passage and The Twelve before beginning to read this book. I was ready and excited to begin reading The City of Mirrors. What I got was something completely different from the previous novels and yet an experience I appreciated and grew to understand.
                The twelve have been destroyed. The survivors are now trying to live in a world where virals haven’t been seen in over two decades. The roles in this new world have changed and people are branching out beyond the protection of the walls to begin anew. Townships have formed. Families are living their lives. All seems well. But Fanning is waiting and biding his time. It is Fanning and the story of what makes him Zero that sets the tone for this novel. What he has planned will determine the lives of all the survivors. And what of Amy the omega to Zero’s alpha? How will she play a role in the survival of mankind. Peter, Michael, Sara, Hollis and the generations that live will learn that the virals are not just a myth of decades past.
                It all ends here. I always had in the back of my mind while reading this series that someone must survive because all of the excerpts from “The Book of Sara” and “The Book of Auntie” were read a thousand years in the future. But there were moments while reading this book where I had no idea if surviving was even truly an option. This story was full of high drama and suspense. The story of Zero, where he narrates his life in first person, genuinely through me for a loop though. I honestly feel like too much time was spent creating his dialogue. As much as he is a pivotal character in the series, his diatribe about his life could have been seriously reduced. I blame this on the fact that I was not invested in the villain or his story. I was invested in the survivors and the lives they were living. Was his story interesting? Yes, but to an extent. If I try and imagine what this novel would have been like without so much of his dialogue, I think it would have been more terrifying and more suspenseful. Too much insight into his plans killed a lot of the suspense for me.
                Did I enjoy The City of Mirrors? Yes, I did. Regardless of how I feel about Fanning and his narration this was still a well written, suspenseful story. All of the characters’ lives had progressed in new an unexpected ways. There was highly mystical and at times biblical sense laced within this series that was really emphasized in this last novel. The world building in this novel was amazing and what I have come to expect from Cronin. My opinion wavered throughout this novel but it ended really well. Cronin structured a world that had to commence in a final battle and this did. Well done. I give this novel 4 out of 5 stars. 

Thank you Netgalley for a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. 





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steve Johnson

By -
Image
Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steve Johnson Bringing to life the story of a notorious pirate to a modern audience isn’t an easy task. We’re too used to the comfort of easy travel, the mythos of pirates and the commercialized imagery produced by movies and television. Images of Jack Sparrow and Long John Silver have been part of entertainment for so long that the idea of true piracy and all it’s ruthlessness has almost been washed away. It isn’t until you’re able to wash away the false images and submerge yourself into the actual history that you can see piracy for it’s truly brutal nature. It also brings up many questions about governments, laws, corporations, scandal, colonization and other factors that allowed piracy to flourish and exist in the manner that it did for so long. Piracy didn’t exist in a bubble. Enemy of All Mankind takes the story of one pirate, who helped usher in the Golden Age of Piracy, and exa
Read more

Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack

By -
Image
Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack          In my case it is always the image of Odetta that comes to mind when I hear her name. The tall, undeniably Black woman, hair in an afro, guitar in hand. It must be that I simply did not know enough about her life, her struggle, and even her music to convey more than that image. But her image is memorable and her presence something not easily described. This book fills in the gaps in the story of Odetta that I didn’t know. Looking back at my childhood, her most memorable songs are the ones I’ve known most of my life, singing in my school’s chapel along with hundreds of other Black students, the words having meaning that I can only truly comprehend decades later as a Black woman.          Zack takes his time with this biography, letting the readers learn as much about Odetta as we do the time from whence she came. Her migration from Alabama to California, her feelings of coming from a loveless, forced marriage,
Read more

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

By -
Image
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood I’m going to cut right to the chase. This book is well written but we didn’t need it. I expected more. I wanted more and this fell flat. I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale , more than once, and I genuinely enjoyed it. The single narrative of Offred lent itself to the story well and it was genuinely a terrifying society. I watched the first two series of the show and though I have my reservations about it, I still thought it was a good show. It does a great job answering questions that the book could not because of its singular narrative. It filled out the world. This book revolves around three narratives: Aunt Lydia, who we know had a helping hand in stripping women of their sense of self and molded them to be controlled by the men of Gilead; Agnes, raised in Gilead with a Commander as father, privileged and set to marry well; and Daisy, a teenager raised in Canada hating Gilead and the abuses women endured that she’s learned about since she
Read more