Now it is dark. Stars soar above the vacant city, heaven's diadem. A century since the last person walked here, and still one cannot travel its streets, as I do, without seeing one's face reflected a thousand-fold. Shop windows. Bodegas and brownstones. The mirrored flanks of skyscrapers, great vertical tombs of glass. I look, and what do I see? Man? Monster? Devil? A freak of cold nature or heaven's cruel utensil? The first is intolerable to think, the second no less so. Who is the monster now?Because this is the third book in a trilogy – a series of books I started reading six years ago – I think it's appropriate to consider it as a part of the whole. I thought that The Passage was very clever: I enjoyed the way that author Justin Cronin was able to come up with plausible science to explain the folklore of vampires. I also really enjoyed the format; the jumping around in time from the present day to the far future and those future people who would regard our current lives as the folklore; I couldn't believe I had to wait three years to see what would happen next. Then, I was rather disappointed with its followup, The Twelve; it was certainly epic, but it strained credulity, and as with any middle of a series, it had the feel of a placeholder to me; a tease before the actual plot resumes. And now, another three years pass, and I got to read The City of Mirrors: and I loved it. I found it to be incredibly exciting and urgent (I fit a six hundred page book in around work and life in two days), and it tied everything up in a satisfying manner, with much to say about the natures of history and love. So, worth the wait (but I wish I hadn't had to wait. I'm not good at waiting.)
A whole generation had grown to adulthood thinking the virals were little more than exaggerated bogeymen in scary stories told by their elders, who, in the fashion of all people since the dawn of time, believed theirs had been the vastly harder and more consequential life.I don't feel like getting specific about the plot for this series, so my comments will be few. I chose not to reread the first two books (that's 1300ish pages), but after going to wikipedia and reading their plot summaries, my memory was more or less refreshed; I was also glad to see that Cronin starts this book with a bit of a historical summary (Thus did it come to pass that Amy and her fellows returned to Kerrville...). Even so, there were a couple of characters that I was having trouble distinguishing, and remembering that there was a Dramatis Personae at the end of The Twelve, I flipped to the back of this book and that was a bit of a mistake: not only did I accidentally see some pictures that I shouldn't have, but I somehow read the last line of this book (which, while not devastating, was regrettable).
Behind every great hatred is a love story.I see that some readers found the backstory in “The Lover” section to be a plot-stopping snoozefest, but I found that bit charming; it may not have been strictly necessary to the overall structure, but I enjoyed it for its own story. I do have a couple of complaints of my own, though, so here are my **spoilers**: I was getting nettled by the frequent mentions of mirrors and constellations – if I can recognise multiple leitmotifs as they're happening, they're not subtle enough – but when the final battle was being funneled towards the concourse of Grand Central Station (with its ceiling of mirror-painted constellations), I grudgingly accepted it all as fateful; too much happened in dreams; I didn't like that Fanning got a happy ending; I didn't like the whole “the European virus was different from the North American – more quickly fatal and spread by birds – and that's why only Americans survived the outbreak”: so what about the whole rest of the world? Couldn't Australians – or other remote islanders – have survived? Why not even one word about Africa or Asia? And I complained in my review for The Twelve that Cronin seemed to be thumbing his nose to comparisons to The Stand by borrowing from it, and it bothered me that The City of Mirrors ends with a character named “Tripp”.
And yet, despite my complaints, I did enjoy this book and the entire series. I enjoyed lines like: It is an interesting truth that the human body, liberated from its head, is in essence a bag of blood with a built-in straw. Ha! I enjoyed that Cronin wrote a story for his daughter with strong female characters. I liked the tension of knowing that anyone could die, and when most of us do, the earth will keep on spinning regardless. To anyone who hasn't started this series, pick it up, now's the time, without all that awful waiting in between volumes.
