A review by ngallion
Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon

3.0

First, this book is better than the three star review I gave it and I don’t doubt that a good many people would love it. I didn’t, though. First, this is a loooong book. I’m not agains a book being long, but this one spends too much time without clear forward momentum. Characters are moving, to be sure, but it doesn’t become clear until the last quarter of the book where anybody is moving to. (That’s not entirely true - some characters are moving toward each other, but even the reason for that isn’t entirely clear.) The meandering nature of the plot - which, for much of the runtime boils down to “traverse the wasteland” - won’t be a problem for many, but for me, it made the book feel overly long and directionless. There are some well-drawn characters here, but there’s very little in the way of a clear character arc in which they change gradually over the course of the book. By about 25% of the way into the book, you’ll know who the good guys and bad guys are and not much will happen along the way that will change that.

Maybe the post-apocalyptic genre just isn’t my thing - I felt similarly about Justin Cronin’s The Passage earlier this year. Or maybe I’m still waiting for a post-apocalyptic book that scratches my particular itch. Either way, the many five star reviews for this one didn’t translate into a great reading experience for me.