mgerardg 's review for:

The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin

2.0

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This might be a good book, but that doesn't mean I liked it. I picked it up because I read The Passage and The Twelve, and I wanted to see how the story ended. The Passage was an amazing book. The Twelve, with its multiple rape scenes, was pretty hard to get through. This book was even worse. It took me ages to finish it because I just didn't care much about the characters. Fanning in particular, and his long monologue in the middle of the book, was just horrible--his thought were overwritten and overly formal in style, and the end of his story was far better than he deserved. I expected there to be some apology after the long chaper he narrated, perhaps in the form of Alicia telling him to get over himself, but when that didn't appear I was pretty disappointed.

The other characters took actions that didn't make a lot of sense or weren't ever fully explained. The book could have ended chapters before it did--I really had no need for the extended epilogue, with characters you barely get to know and an ending for Amy's story that we could have imagined without reading it.

I'm glad I got to read the end of this story, but I think if I return to this world I'll re-read The Passage and leave the other two members of the trilogy alone.