The City of Mirrors

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.