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A review by emilyb_chicago
The Passage by Justin Cronin
3.0
This is at least 3 books crammed into one cover. I found it very difficult to read as a single book and ended up taking long breaks which is unusual for me - even in a very long book. I'm going to review it as three separate sections. I would give a lot of caveats before I recommended this book to another reader, and I would not recommend to someone who wasn't an avid reader. I did, however, love the ideas in this book and found about 2/3rds of it really well written.
The first section was fantastic. Written in the ‘now’ it was engaging, fact paced and the characters were so real feeling. I loved this first section and it left me wanting more.
The second section was written in the 100+ish year future. It felt like many dystopian future books I’ve read but was far less interesting. This section held all the problems the second book in a trilogy has, it was slow paced and meandering. It felt like filler with too much character building and not enough things happening. There were so many characters and so many names to keep track of that I struggled keeping them straight. I would have absolutely stopped at this point if I hadn’t promised to finish this book.
In the final sections, the book becomes a road trip adventure. The pace picked up and the writing became more engaging again, but I still struggled to pick this book up because of the bad taste from the slow sections.
The first section was fantastic. Written in the ‘now’ it was engaging, fact paced and the characters were so real feeling. I loved this first section and it left me wanting more.
The second section was written in the 100+ish year future. It felt like many dystopian future books I’ve read but was far less interesting. This section held all the problems the second book in a trilogy has, it was slow paced and meandering. It felt like filler with too much character building and not enough things happening. There were so many characters and so many names to keep track of that I struggled keeping them straight. I would have absolutely stopped at this point if I hadn’t promised to finish this book.
In the final sections, the book becomes a road trip adventure. The pace picked up and the writing became more engaging again, but I still struggled to pick this book up because of the bad taste from the slow sections.