The City of Mirrors

I've looked forward to this book since finishing “The Twelve” the first time around. It didn't disappoint, at least not until about three quarters of the way through - it had the familiar mix of horror, humanity, love and tragedy I've come to enjoy from the two previous books in the series.There was even an undertone of ecological warning at the end of the book making it more than just an entertaining romp through some post-apocalyptic nighmare landscape. But then Cronin uses one of the worst cliches to get his heroes out of a tight spot: the old I've-tried-everything-I-can-think-of-to-get-this-machine-to-go-now-I'll-just-have-a-fit-with-a-wrench-and-hit-everything-in-sight-because-I'm-so-useless-oh-it-works-now-hooray! Really? I've waited this long for the book, I would have waited another few weeks for you to come up with something less corny. I have taken away one star for your lack of ingenuity, Mr. Cronin (although really I enjoyed it enough for it to be a four star read). And once again I would say stay away from pregnancy and birth, describing it is really not your forte.

Edit 24/08/2018
Don't know what my problem was, I couldn't put it down and I didn't have the same problems this time round - except with the wrench, it made me cringe again. I would give it five stars now.

I was shaken from the beginning because I was not expecting Alicia to have a baby. The baby itself was beautiful, but how she was conceived hurt my heart and made me feel raw emotions I was unexpected to feel. I found this book is the only one in the trilogy that I cried over. I recall times when my heart actually raced due to being worried for the characters and the return of the virals. The more I read the more heartbreak I experienced. Pim had my heart from her introduction into the scene. Her presence happened just as I thought things were going to get better. I feel this is the theme of the book for me. Just when I thought things were looking up somewhere, there was heartbreak, destruction, or something else going wrong elsewhere. There were several times in this book, and to be honest this series, where I was annoyed with the writing style and repetitive words, but I wanted to see this story through. I cannot say I was a fan when the point of view changed to a first-person narrative. Learning about Tim Fanning made it easier to feel empathy towards him, but not enough to like him. The book seemed to drag out near the end, and the ending, though interesting, did not sit well with me. The trilogy as a whole was good and I am glad to have finished it.

Favorite quote: “All things fell into the past but one; and what that was, was love”.

Great trilogy with a fantastic last book! Cronin took a lot of idea from The Stand for sure. He writes a series about a government created virus that wipes out most of the world and people are trying to survive, but He gives a supernatural twist making it about Vampires. Yes please! He has a character named Rand, as in Randall Flagg... Come on that's too easy. His main antagonist, Zero is also very similar to Flagg but Cronin does such a good job with Zero. This book sets off after they killed The Twelve and are now preparing for Zero's wrath but he's much stronger and deadlier than the twelve. Cronin gives a lot of the beginning to give a background of Zero's life to give you a little compassion for him, which I love a good guy/bad guy antagonist. Cronin also gave one of the best endings to a book I've ever read.

Grand finale to an epic saga of human survivors pitted against vampiric mutant hordes. Cronin is expert at creating well-developed, believable characters that makes the saga more than just another zombie tale. In this third and last installment Cronin includes the tragic background story of the man who came to be patient Zero and last of the original mutants who control a personal army of the virals. The story timeline jumps from the time of the original outbreak and collapse of modern civilization to a century later and finally to a thousand years later. It is a tale of fear, tragedy, love, hope and triumph where a core group led by the mysterious ageless woman Amy must confront and defeat patient Zero or risk the end of the human race. A must read for fans of the science fiction/horror genre.

Thank all that is holy that this is over. Spoilers and I don't care. I actually wasn't feeling particularly annoyed about this book until I started writing my review. Sigh.

There were parts that were all right. There were even some cool sentences here and there.

But it was also tedious. And, frankly, it also had elements of cheesy men's romance and trite whiny privileged white guy litfic for a rather large chunk of the middle. If you read litfic, any litfic written by middle-aged white men, you already know Zero. And his motivation for wanting to destroy everything is pathetic, rather like a badly-written video game (and I like video games). There are so many scenes of sap in this nearly 600-page tome. It gets tedious and unoriginal. There are also numerous accounts of manly hugging or manly emotion or manly shaking of hands. The characters are mostly super gendered. Yawn. There are all manner of men having sappy happy or bittersweet endings with their beloveds.

And Alicia was really wasted in this book. Seriously, there was no point to it. In the beginning, she gives birth, but her daughter is dead, and she is traumatized for the next twenty years because of it. Some characters, I could believe this, and that would be fine. But Alicia has been problematic throughout the course of the entire series. She's the cool tough girl that writers throw into their work to seem more feminist, and it's fine for girls to be cool and tough, but Alicia's trite. I have found her to be mishandled the entire time.

Zero/Timothy Fanning has a few moments in which he almost made me chuckle, but then he became tiresome and trite too. Just nothing original here at all. Mopey rich professor boohoohoo, I'm going to destroy the world because I'm lonely and bitter. And then he's actually just a pathetic lunatic in the end and not a very good villain at all.

The parts I appreciated were the prairie/settler horror bits happening in the middle part of the book, and I really wish Cronin had done more with that. I want settlers disappearing and crouching behind doors in fear. But it's sadly short-lived. I also found Michael and Greer rebuilding a boat with which to save the remnants of humanity, but I like nautical stuff.

There are a few chapters in Iowa, but they occur late in the game and are virtually pointless.

And everything Amy does is pointless. If one's daughter requests a story in which a girl saves the world, MAKE THE GIRL BLOODY WELL SAVE THE WORLD! Amy is supposed to be the great savior. She really isn't. She is given an army by her friend Cater, which promptly goes to waste and DIES. PETER is President and an epic fail, because he makes a bad decision and loses most of the population of his city, which is actually convenient, because only about 700 people can fit on Michael's boat.

Because Fanning is all-knowing and basically has the power of GOD, he planned for all of this to happen, even though he's a wallowing nutjob who goes out like a total punk in the end. And even though Amy should also be clever and powerful, she's weak and useless. Way to have her be our hero, dude. She apparently has no magic vamp strength.

I also wonder why some people died in this and not others. Some of the deaths seemed pointless to me, whilst I would have thought other people wouldn't make it through the entirety of the series.

There are so many tralalala dream sequences in which men are sappy that this book really is no better than a schlocky romance. Even our villain has a sappy, happy ending, because his love is why he did everything all the time, even though he was kind of a jerk.

And the final chapter. Tedious pseudo-historical blather and then MORE bad middle-aged man litfic. But it takes place a thousand years in the future. I'm so bloody glad that A MILLENNIUM in the FUTURE, people have striven and survived hardships, having to start society from scratch–only to have it look EXACTLY like society does NOW, but minus cellphones. Things are still stupidly gendered and dull. There's a weird moral judgment cast against people who have multiple partners in this dull future, by the character we now follow, about whom we're presumably supposed to care. His name is Logan, and he's in his 50s and hooking up with a woman 20 years his junior who is hot, blah blah blah, whatever, because the end of this book sucks.

After a thousand years, humanity, now living in the southern hemisphere, may return to North America, and that's where the tale ends. In the Pacific Northwest, with Amy as an old lady, and Logan finds her and wants her to tell her story.

Gods above, please spare us.

I honestly thought this book was sort of passable in parts, because there were some decent paragraphs and a few creepy bits when settlers start disappearing. But then THIS END happened, and I thought, ‘No. This book actually does suck.'

Please don't let there be a side story of the Adventures of Michael Alone on His Boat. It will just be more men's romance. Don't pretend these books are high literature, because they aren't. They are thrillers rife with maudlin sentimentality. If you like such things, fine. But please don't pretend this is a monumental achievement, because it's not. Still, this was leagues better than the second book, which was actually downright offensive.