THE CITY OF MIRRORS – Justin Cronin | Looking For a Good Book

Justin Cronin finishes off his epic, The Passage, trilogy with The City of Mirrors.

Time has passed since ‘The Twelve’ got their butts kicked. Life is good and the sense of real community is growing again. Amy is missing but she is being seen in peoples’ dreams. And we get to know Zero.

We really get to know Zero.

Zero, once known as Timothy J. Fanning, was the original viral, the original vampire, who started what became the end of the world, is now 150 years old and he wants people to know his story. And if you’re a 150 year old vampire, father to all the other vampires, you get what you want. Which means we have to listen in. And Zero’s story, only about a quarter of this book, at nearly 200 pages, is a book in itself.

He gives us a bit of a sob story, but what he really wants is to face off against Amy – Amy, the savior of humanity if she can win the final battle. But where is Amy? Will she actually appear?

And surrounding this novel-within-a-novel, we get a bunch of other stories – a wrap up of humanity.

I thought that the first book in this series was great – filled with excitement and danger, with a ton of questions. It made me eager to read the second book. But that second book really felt rough to me. This one feels just as rough, but in a different way. Here we have the last book in a very long series, which took a number of years to complete, and it feels like too much effort went in to making sure everything was wrapped up nicely … combined with a backstory that didn’t get told in the previous 1300 pages of story.

Maybe it’s because the story of these people wasn’t very fresh in my head (sorry, but I was not going to go back and reread those first two books) but I kind of didn’t care too much through most of the book. There were moments, however (just as with the previous volume), that were really fascinating. The question about Amy – what happened to her, where is she, will she face off against Zero? – kept me going here. But this is a damned long book for just this.

I definitely feel like I jumped on the bandwagon with this book. The first book was really good and it got a lot of good publicity. Many of us were eager – desperate even – to read the follow up. And then we felt committed. We’d spent hours reading a lot of pages. It was just going to be a waste of time if we didn’t read to the conclusion, right?

I think I need a t-shirt that reads “I read all of The Passage series”

Looking for a good book? The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin concludes a series, and if you’ve read the first two books you might want to finish it off. On the other hand, you could go on and read three other books with a better chance that you’ll find satisfaction with one of them.