Bookish Thoughts

The thrilling conclusion to Justin Cronin's Passage trilogy is certainly epic. And meandering. Once again, he jumps back into the past to flesh out the backstory of characters in the present. This time with a lengthy look into what Zero was like as a human that could almost be its own book. This sounds like a complaint, but it's not really. Cronin takes the same care with his characters and settings that Robert Jordan did in The Wheel of Time . He manages to be more concise, but only because his scope is (amazingly) smaller than Jordan's was. And because his baddies don't keep resurrecting themselves. Dead is actually dead in this world. Looking back on the trilogy as a whole, I'm glad I read it. I enjoyed it a lot. But I'm not sure I'd ever recommend it. It hit so many of my specific buttons that I'd have trouble believing someone else would like it as much as me. It's immense and slow. It's about vampires. It's a little bit mystic beyo...

I knew going in that The Twelve  was not as well-received as The Passage . This is often the case with the second installment in a series. Too often they serve as mere bridges from the intriguing beginning to the thrilling conclusion, with little meat of their own. This wasn't entirely the case with The Twelve , which I though was similar in style and scope to its prequel. It meandered a lot, but the so did the first book. There was an enormous cast of characters, spread over multiple locations. But I ultimately found it just as heart-rending and entertaining as the first book. One thing that frustrated me early on was Cronin's decision to return to the immediate aftermath of the viral outbreak. Most of the characters I cared about live 100 years after this point, and it seemed weird to focus on a group of people who were definitely going to die, one way or another, before the main focus of the book. But as the story progressed and the threads came together, this return to ...

I first read The Passage many years ago and absolutely loved it. It's a sprawling, epic tale about vampires. It stretches from coast to coast and covers about 100 years, from the time when the vampires first appeared to when the resistance to them starts to actually be effective. There's a lot in this book, especially since it has to establish two entirely different casts of characters a century apart from each other, linked only by the girl Amy, humanity's last hope. Because thus book has such a wide scope, it is occasionally pretty slow. Because of that, I think it held up better on the re-read. It didn't drag nearly as much as I remembered, mostly because I knew where it was headed and why Cronin was slowing down to include the details he was. The end result is a very rich book about a rampant virus and vampires and the near end of the world. It's about humanity's ability to hang on to hope even when all hope is lost, and to keep fighting even when we know...

The Passage , by Justin Cronin, is a beast of a book.  It's a sprawling, epic story told in 766 pages. And when I was halfway through it, I learned that it's only the first novel in a planned trilogy. Which...I can see where the story is going in the next book. I definitely think there's enough plot left to keep things interesting for two more books. But the last thing I need right now is another epic series. So, The Passage . The only thing I knew when I started it was that it was about vampires. I mentioned this to my boyfriend's mom when she loaned it to me, and she was quick to say that they aren't really vampires. They don't have a lot of the classic "vampire" characteristics. But the thing is, every vampire legend picks and chooses the bits of the legend they want to use. Bram Stoker's vampires couldn't cross running water and had to sleep in the soil of their homeland. Anne Rice's vampires absolutely could not change t...