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The City of Mirrors Justin Cronin 9780752897899 Books

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The City of Mirrors Justin Cronin 9780752897899 Books

I just finished City of Mirrors, and I'm partly writing this review so I can talk about it with somebody. I am a pretty voracious reader, but I've found that my patience for long books has waned in past years, maybe because we live more and more in a 140-character world. City of Mirrors is the first book in a very long time that I wanted to savor, that I didn't want to finish: parts of it left my jaw hanging and my eyes as wide as they can be opened.

It is not a perfect book: in my opinion, Cronin's female characters are all a little too alike and a little too perfect: sassy, smart, headstrong (I know, could be much worse). When the men in his stories fall in love with these women, they fall instantaneously, hard, and forever, whether they're 14 or 60. But I think that might be my only critique of his writing. So now that's over with, I can sing its many, many praises.

Justin Cronin has a gift for creating sentences. His grasp of language and ability to use it to capture a moment so clearly it's as though I'm watching a movie is unassailable, whether or not one appreciates his "genre." He is able to build a story like those cotton candy machines create their cloud of sugar: completely three-dimensional, yet diaphanous, with no more structure than absolutely necessary to hold the creation together. In an era where I truly believe we are witnessing the dumbing down of our language into tweetable, textable shortcuts, Cronin pulls out his dictionary and finds the exact right word to depict the emotion of the moment. There wasn't a single time when I thought, "this is overwritten," or "less detail, please:" it was pitch-perfect in its creation of people, relationships, and the scenery upon which those relationships were played out.

I won't give any spoilers: I'll just say that for me, the book brought a very satisfying end to this epic tale. There might have been one or two places that felt a little too "tidy" and fortuitous, but overall his storytelling walks the balance between fantasy and true, imaginable possibility with utter grace. I am truly sorry to see these characters go, at least until I start reading the whole trilogy all over again, which I guarantee I will.


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The City of Mirrors Justin Cronin 9780752897899 Books Reviews

I loved the first book, liked the second, but this final novel was absolute torture to get through. Reading it reminded me of the feeling one has watching the last season of a TV show you once enjoyed that should have been cancelled long ago. Reading "City of Mirrors," I found myself generally angry and aggravated with Cronin. Even his creativity with character names began to seem forced and lame and contrived ("Nessa?" "Olla?" Gag me.) By and large, however, Fanning's 1980s Cambridge interlude was the worst and most self-indulgent nonsense I have ever been forced into reading. I'm not sure which Harvard Cronin attended in the 1980s, but I was aghast that he got so much of that era wrong. His characters behaved more like they were inhabiting the late 1950s and early 1960s as the segment began that I kept hearing the theme to "A Summer Place" and envisioning Cate Blanchett in her "The Talented Mr. Ripley" dresses. If I wanted to read a period piece about being in my late teens and early twenties during the 1980s I would have reread "Less than Zero" or "Bright Lights, Big City" (although technically Fanning starts school in late '89.) The entire book required a strong, scolding, editor. The illustrations at the end of the book are an unexpected bright spot - but by then it is far too late.
Justin Cronin’s Passage series has always been fascinating for its refusal to easily be pigeonholed into any one genre. On one level, it’s an apocalyptic horror epic, one in which a tribe of vampiric creatures has wiped out most of the population of the Earth. On another level, it’s a survival story, one in which people are working to rebuild civilization in the face of unimaginable disaster. And on yet another level, it’s a rich character drama, one in which people’s choices and character arcs drive the action every bit as much as the threats around them.

That refusal to stick to any one genre is both the best and the most frustrating thing about The City of Mirrors, the final entry in the trilogy. At times uplifting, at times heartbreaking, at times terrifying, The City of Mirrors takes all of Cronin’s habits to extremes. This is a book that features the most terrifying and nightmarish sequence of any of the novels to date; it’s also one which dedicates a huge percentage to the backstory of its major villain – a backstory which is mainly about a young student navigating his complicated relationship with his friends and struggling with his attraction to one of them.

That means that City of Mirrors can often be frustrating, even while it’s constantly engaging. Cronin’s prose remains solid, and his willingness to focus on character depth has always been one of the pleasures of the series. Every character, no matter how major or minor, gets respect and a fully realized backstory; it’s a choice that’s paid off again and again in this series. The choice to go to this level of depth is a somewhat strange one, and one that undeniably hurts the pacing of this book. And yet, once you finish the book, you start to realize that Cronin has more on his mind than simply wrapping up his apocalyptic epic.

Indeed, you could be forgiven for thinking that Cronin had ended the series already. (Spoilers for The Twelve follow.) After all, by the end of the previous book, The Twelve, the titular Twelve – the original infected – had been destroyed, and peace seemed to be inevitable. Yes, Amy’s fate was up in the air, as was Alicia’s, but the story seemed to be at a sort of ending point. (Spoilers end.) Indeed, it’s a feeling shared by many characters in the novel, who feel that the story is at an end, and that humanity is finally entering a world of peace and rebuilding.

But The City of Mirrors reminds us that there’s one major threat still surviving, and focuses on that threat the originator of the plague, a creature only known as Zero. And in Cronin’s hands, this final battle is as much ideological as it is physical. Is there any reason for hope? Does humanity deserve to survive? What, exactly, does survival mean, and at what cost should we attempt to survive? And what part does hope play in all of this? Cronin takes on the questions that underlie so many apocalyptic horror tales – from The Stand to The Fireman to The Walking Dead – and makes them part of the text, thus justifying the time spent on Zero’s backstory. Yes, it’s long, and it sort of wrecks the pacing…but it ends up being central to the philosophical battle at the heart of the novel.

That conflict extends all the way to the ending of the book, which finds Cronin looking at the far larger picture as to what it all means. It’s something he’s been hinting at all through the series, and yet that final section of The City of Mirrors is nonetheless quietly moving, giving us a true epilogue to the story, and an ending that nicely brings his themes together. The endings of apocalyptic tales are always complicated – just look at the three very different endings (or lack thereof) of the titles I mentioned above – and it’s rare to find one that moves so strongly toward optimism. And yet, it works here, giving an ending that both wraps up the story and feels emotionally satisfying. The City of Mirrors is an ambitious book, and one that’s far more “literary” and less conventional than its predecessors. And yet, nonetheless, it sticks the landing for the trilogy, satisfying the reader on a variety of levels while still providing the thrills and excitement we’ve come to demand from the series. It may be a little lumpy at points, but I’ll forgive that for the level of satisfaction that I got from the book as a whole.
I just finished City of Mirrors, and I'm partly writing this review so I can talk about it with somebody. I am a pretty voracious reader, but I've found that my patience for long books has waned in past years, maybe because we live more and more in a 140-character world. City of Mirrors is the first book in a very long time that I wanted to savor, that I didn't want to finish parts of it left my jaw hanging and my eyes as wide as they can be opened.

It is not a perfect book in my opinion, Cronin's female characters are all a little too alike and a little too perfect sassy, smart, headstrong (I know, could be much worse). When the men in his stories fall in love with these women, they fall instantaneously, hard, and forever, whether they're 14 or 60. But I think that might be my only critique of his writing. So now that's over with, I can sing its many, many praises.

Justin Cronin has a gift for creating sentences. His grasp of language and ability to use it to capture a moment so clearly it's as though I'm watching a movie is unassailable, whether or not one appreciates his "genre." He is able to build a story like those cotton candy machines create their cloud of sugar completely three-dimensional, yet diaphanous, with no more structure than absolutely necessary to hold the creation together. In an era where I truly believe we are witnessing the dumbing down of our language into tweetable, textable shortcuts, Cronin pulls out his dictionary and finds the exact right word to depict the emotion of the moment. There wasn't a single time when I thought, "this is overwritten," or "less detail, please" it was pitch-perfect in its creation of people, relationships, and the scenery upon which those relationships were played out.

I won't give any spoilers I'll just say that for me, the book brought a very satisfying end to this epic tale. There might have been one or two places that felt a little too "tidy" and fortuitous, but overall his storytelling walks the balance between fantasy and true, imaginable possibility with utter grace. I am truly sorry to see these characters go, at least until I start reading the whole trilogy all over again, which I guarantee I will.