The biggest hurdle The City
of Mirrors has to jump over is the passage (no pun intended) of time. It has
been four years since Justin Cronin’s second book in his proposed Passage trilogy,
The Twelve came out, and now, with the third one here so long after the last
installment, a lot of the grandeur that kept me enthralled over books one and
two has sadly faded away (I guess I know now how Game of Thrones fans feel). If
you are picking this up after having just read the first two books, you’ll be
fine and the story will be able to work as a grand, complex whole. If like me,
it has been awhile since you visited these characters, you’d be obliged to read
up on them in someway, whether rereading the books, which I rarely do,
listening to the audio versions, which I did for the first one back in 2013,
but even that and a prologue at the beginning of this book, didn’t help bring this
series of novels to a satisfying close for me. I won’t get into the heavier
details, since a lot of what this book is about hinges on what happens in the
first two books. Let’s just say that thing seem normal at the beginning, with a
few people and loyalties scattered across the southern tip of what used to be
the United States. Of course they aren’t and that is mainly due to the rise of Patient
Zero of the viral epidemic, Fanning, whose sad story is the best part of this
novel: a fresh tale of woe among characters and settings I could barely recall
at times, let alone bask in their importance. It might be an unfair assessment
of this book, which is well written and more sophisticated than other books
like it, but this final installment of a series that fascinated me has left me more
than a bit underwhelmed.
Rating: 4/5
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